Kevin Lynagh published a short essay this week about how he sabotages his own projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing. Four hours researching semantic diff tools when he needed an Emacs shortcut. Hundreds of hours on background research for a Clojure-Rust hybrid and a constraint-based CAD tool, neither shipped. The piece landed on me hard because I have been keeping a list. My list is of projects I killed without shipping. Over the last three years it has grown to about forty. In the same window I shipped twenty. So for every one I ship I kill two. The patterns of the killed ones are almost always the same. Market did not kill them. Competition did not kill them. I killed them by thinking too hard before building. The three ways I sabotage a project 1. Researching the wrong depth first Every dead project has a research graveyard in my notes. Deep reads on niche architecture choices. Benchmarks of libraries I would never actually use. Comparison tables of state management patterns.…