I see a lot of engineers, including myself, let an idea run loose and balloon until we don't even want to work on it anymore. We start optimizing for multi-user support, payment flows, subscriptions, or perfectly modularized components before we've even written the first useful line of code.

Suddenly the fun is gone, and the scope is so bloated it doesn't feel worth finishing.

What's worked better for me lately is scoping things down to the point where they almost feel dumb. Stupidly small. I start with the idea, then ask myself: "In the next hour, can I complete one part of this and ship it?"

Yes, ship the one thing.

Example

Pocket, the beloved link collector and read-later app, shut down this year. While I didn't use it a lot, I loved the simplicity of the tool. So I decided I could build that as a simple API, have a web scraper extract the content and return it later when I wanted to read it. I also wanted to play with AI tools, perhaps running the content through an AI prompt to get a quick summary.

I started with one thing: ship a tokenized API framework. Using Laravel Sanctum, I had it stood up and deployed in less than an hour. Next came one endpoint to collect one field, a URL. Shipped.

From there, each chunk I built, I shipped. Each small iteration built on the last until it was finished. Then I created a React Native iOS app to display this content for myself in the same manner.

Takeaways

When the stakes are low, progress is fast. When the scope is tiny, there's no room for scope creep. It either works or it doesn't. There's something satisfying about making something and using it within the same hour. No polish. No audience. Just utility.

I think we talk ourselves out of good ideas by making them too big too soon. We want them to be perfect, to scale, to impress. But sometimes the most useful things are the ones you scoped small enough to actually finish.

You might surprise yourself with how much gets done when you stop trying to make it a thing.