The 12-Month Bug: Why Your Side Project Is Still Just an Idea

zakelfassi.com

8 points·zakelfassi··2 comments

Just last weekend I finally made a prototype of a game I had been thinking about for a long time. this is not my field but an LLM got me from idea to a playable 'this is what I had in mind' in a few hours. That said, someone who already knows JavaScript could probably have implemented my description quicker and better.

That’s the sweet spot, honestly. It’s less about whether an LLM can crank out scaffolding faster than someone fluent in JavaScript and more about what it unlocks: the ability to collapse “thinking about it for months” into “there’s a thing I can actually click/play with.”

That’s the core of what I was trying to name with the 12-month bug: our tendency to loop in abstraction long after execution could’ve started. Doesn’t matter if the code’s rough; the point is you crossed the boundary. From there, the real operating system is iteration.

If it’s useful, I wrote a companion post called Stuck Theory: Resistance as Fitness Function. Similar~ish meta-conclusion. For me the blog as a whole is a running attempt to debug how we keep pushing dense, sometimes unwieldy information down our own neural pathways while AI is gradually offloading the lighter parts of cognition. Thanks for reading!

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