Overcoming "Shiny Object Syndrome" of a developer😅
Let me know if this sounds familiar: You get a brilliant idea, grind your way to 70% completion, and then... bam. A wild new idea appears. You abandon the first project, chase the new one, and the cycle inevitably repeats.
I recently looked back at my own progress and had a harsh reality check. Because of this relentless Shiny Object Syndrome, I have exactly ZERO fully completed projects. Just a digital graveyard of 70%-done repositories.
So, I’m putting my foot down and starting over from the very first idea I ever had.
🕵️♂️ The Original Project: Terminal Alibi
The concept sparked after I participated in a prompt injection competition. I wanted to build an interactive mystery game where the player acts as a detective, and the AI plays a criminal suspect. The core gameplay loop? Breaking the suspect's alibi using nothing but your words.
🧱 The Bottleneck (Why I dropped it)
Making an AI roleplay as a suspect in a crime immediately triggered standard safety guardrails. I kept hitting the dreaded predefined wall: "I cannot fulfill this request."
My options at the time weren't great:
Common APIs: Too heavily censored for compelling crime roleplay.
Uncensored Local Models: Too hardware-demanding. A standard laptop simply couldn't handle the power requirements natively.
Right as I hit this roadblock, another shiny new idea caught my eye, and the detective game was shelved.
🚀 The Revival & The Tech Pivot
I’m back at it, but with a massive shift in how the game runs. Instead of forcing heavy, unconstrained roleplay from an API, I'm focusing purely on gamified prompt injection. More importantly, I'm powering it using the small, highly capable models baked directly into your browser.
If you use a Chromium-based browser, you likely already have these models sitting on your machine knowingly or unknowingly (you can enable them via chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano).
My goal is to utilize this zero-install, local AI resource that almost everyone already has without even realizing it.
I’m currently wrestling with a new technical hurdle on this build, but I refuse to let Shiny Object Syndrome win this time. I guess you all will get to see the finished, playable version of this soon enough! 😅
Has anyone else here successfully broken out of the 70%-completion loop? How did you finally force yourself to finish that first project?