Scope creep
When a project keeps growing as small extra requests pile up, until it's late, bloated, or never done.
What it is
Scope creep is the slow expansion of what you're building: "while you're at it, add…", repeated until the original goal is buried. Each addition seems small; together they sink the project.
With coding agents, scope creep can also happen inside one request: asking for five unrelated changes at once makes each one less likely to land well.
The cure is naming the scope up front, adding new ideas to a list for later, and giving one focused request at a time.
How to ask for it
“Also add comments, and notifications, and a mobile app, and make the dashboard better.”
“To avoid scope creep, this change is only the comments feature on tasks. Please add notifications, mobile, and dashboard improvements to the roadmap and don't start them yet.”
Piling four requests together dilutes each; naming scope creep and limiting the change keeps quality high.
You've seen this in
- AA "quick" website that turned into a six-month project
- FFeature lists that grow every meeting
- SSoftware that does everything and nothing well