donald-knuth-syndrome

NOTE(coined-term): This is a term coined by myself.

The "Donald Knuth Syndrome" is the following behaviour pattern:

• You are working on a side project Project_A.
• You reached to the conclusion that you need the tool Tool_A for this.
• You try to learn Tool_A but "they are not as good as you've thought".
• You decide to make a new tool to replace Tool_A.
• "Making this new tool" is now a new side project Project_B.
• You decided that you need Tool_B, then Tool_B is also not good enough which makes you create a new side project which leads to more side project ad infinitum.

It's named after Donald E. Knuth because he infamously spent years working on TeX and Metafont just for typesetting the computer book series he was working on.