yak shaving
[ yak SHEY-ving ]noun
A chain of one-more-thing-first jobs that carries you further and further from what you sat down to do.
Explanation
The phrase comes out of MIT lab lore in the 1990s. AI is unusually good at it, because every detour looks reasonable on its own, and nothing in the loop ever asks whether you are still solving the original problem.
Related words
- the 90% trap — When an AI builds most of a feature in an hour, and the last little bit takes days.
- blast radius — How far a change can reach: every file and every behaviour it could possibly touch.
Prompts that deal with it
- Stop Refactoring — You asked for one line, you got four hundred
- Measure Before Optimising — No guessing at slow