Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.

Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.

What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…

It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.

The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.

I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.

Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...