Project rabbit-hole

A project rabbit-hole is when you think of an idea for a project, but then realize you’d need to do something else in order to make the project, but then in order to do that you’d need to re-do something else that already exists, until eventually you’re reconsidering the entire body of foundational work you might build upon.

A common problem in computing. Gary Bernhardt’s Whole New World is an example: he wanted a text editor, ended up needing to change the Unix kernel.

Personal instances of this include Infologie.