Three months of commits. Private repo. Never deployed. That's not a story about a bad project. The project was fine — a UAV mission planner that could generate flight paths and export KML files. Clean idea. Technically interesting. Real use case. It just never left the hard drive. Here's the thing nobody tells you about side projects that stall: the blocker is almost never the code. The code gets written. It gets rewritten. Refactored. The folder structure gets reorganized twice. A new branch appears called feature/cleanup . Another called experiment/maybe-better-approach . The repo grows. The project doesn't. You're not stuck because you don't know how to build it. You're stuck because there's no moment that requires it to exist. A METR study published in July 2025 (arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) found that experienced developers working with AI tools were 19% slower than those working without them on real-world software engineering tasks. That number gets cited a lot as an AI critique.…