yak shaving

programmingops culture

The chain of unrelated sub-tasks you must finish before you can do the thing you actually set out to do.

You want to fix one bug, but first you must update a library, which needs a newer runtime, which needs a config change, and suddenly you are shaving a yak. The term comes from the MIT AI Lab in the 1990s. Naming it is useful: it is the cue to ask whether the detour is really necessary.

Also known as: yak-shaving, shaving the yak

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