How I Turned a Weekend Project into an Existential Crisis

How a two‑week plugin turned into a 46,081‑line chaos spiral—and what I learned.

So here's the thing about scope creep: it's like agreeing to help your friend move “just a few boxes” and somehow ending up disassembling their entire kitchen while they’re at work. Except in this case, I’m both the friend asking for help and the idiot with the screwdriver, and the kitchen is a fucking Obsidian plugin that was supposed to take two weeks.

Two weeks, I told myself! Build a simple tool that scans my notes and spits out some AI-generated insights. Easy. Done. Ship it.

That was four months ago.

What I Said I Was Building

“RetrospectAI: A simple Obsidian plugin that helps users reflect on their notes.”

You know what that means in normal-person speak? Scan some markdown files, ask ChatGPT what it thinks, and make a summary note. Boom. Done. The kind of thing you build on a weekend when you're procrastinating on literally anything else…