하지만 yak shaving은 재미있다

Yak shaving—when pursuing a goal leads to an endless chain of prerequisite tasks—is simultaneously an engineering antipattern and a source of innovation, as exemplified by Donald Knuth's creation of TeX. The challenge for modern engineers and managers is balancing the genuine joy of building solutions from scratch against the risk of scope creep and missed deadlines. Understanding this tension reveals not just how to avoid wasteful tangents, but when to embrace them as learning opportunities or transformative projects.