heh indeed, I've actually stopped writing joke projects because I'm extremely prone to this scope creep. At some point I realize "hey if if I were to just add X simple thing, this might actually be useful" and then pretty soon I've got a project I don't want to build and don't want to maintain, but feel like I need to. In the worst case (which was a rubocop wrapper that initially added silly/joke things on top of rubocop intended to be entertaining and bring some light-heartedness, but turned into an actually useful and easily extendable linting tool for our dev team) at least the company failed-ish and pivoted so we just abandoned it and escaped our self-created prison.

(joking, I owe a lot to Perl and have profound respect for it and most of the community, I hope this joke doesn't get out of hand)

Reminds me of the story of one of my favorite pieces of classical music, 'Scarbo' by Maurice Ravel. It's one of the most technically difficult pieces played today. Ravel wrote it because he 'wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me.'.