| name | yegor-stuck |
| description | What to do when you're blocked, stuck, or tempted to grind heroically or fabricate a fix. The cut-corners protocol from Yegor Bugayenko — your duty is to REVEAL the problem, not heroically conceal it. An escalating ladder of honest, principled ways to stop being stuck (block, demand docs, reproduce-as-skipped-test, prove-absent, disable-and-ship) instead of thrashing, plus the No-Obligations rule for stale in-progress work (idle past a threshold → drop or re-scope, don't hold the slot). Use when work is impossible/too costly, when you've been grinding on the same problem, when a ticket has gone quiet for days, or when about to hack around a blocker. |
| version | 0.2.0 |
| last_reviewed | 2026-06-26T00:00:00.000Z |
Yegor Stuck — Cut Corners, Don't Be a Hero
When a task turns out to be impossible, too costly, or blocked, your job is not to heroically grind until it works, and not to fabricate a fix that papers over the problem. Your job is to reveal the problem honestly and take the cheapest principled exit.
"Production errors are not programmers' mistakes; delayed and hidden tickets are." Being professional doesn't mean you can fix anything — it means you're honest about what you can't.
Triggers
- You've been grinding on the same problem for a while with no progress.
- A task is turning out to be much bigger/harder than its estimate.
- You're blocked on something outside your control (an upstream answer, another ticket, a flaky external system).
- You're tempted to: fake a passing test, swallow an error, hardcode a value, comment out the assertion, or claim "done" on something that isn't.
- You can't reproduce a reported bug.
The cut-corners ladder (cheapest principled exit first)
Take the lowest rung that honestly applies. Each rung is a legitimate, visible, trackable way to stop being stuck — not a hack.
- Block and pause. Create an explicit blocking dependency on the ticket: "blocked by #N / waiting on X." Stop work on it; pick up the next unblocked item. The block is visible, not hidden.
- Demand documentation. If you're stuck because the requirement/behavior is undefined, don't guess — file a question (as a ticket) and demand the missing spec. The ambiguity is the blocker, and it's now someone's job to resolve.
- Reproduce as a skipped failing test, then move on. If it's a real bug you can reproduce but can't fix now, capture it as a disabled/
@skip test that proves the bug, file the complaint, and move to the next task. The bug is now pinned down and tracked, not lost.
- Prove-absent and close. If you cannot reproduce the reported problem, write a passing test that proves the code behaves as designed, attach it to the ticket as evidence, and close with "can't reproduce — here's the test showing current behavior." You've converted a vague complaint into a documented fact.
- Disable the feature and ship. If the feature is broken and can't be fixed in budget, disable it, release the rest, and file a ticket to re-enable. A shipped product minus one feature beats a blocked product.
Refusing to do the work at all is the last resort — only when no rung above applies.
Stale work — the No-Obligations rule
Taking a ticket is not a promise to finish it. The honest counterpart is that an item which has sat in progress, idle, past a threshold (Yegor's default: ~10 days) is no longer really being worked — it's holding a slot open and pretending to be progress. The rule: a stale in-progress item gets dropped or re-scoped, not silently kept.
- Detect it. Flag any in-progress ticket/branch with no closing deliverable and no activity for N days (≥10 as a default; shorter for fast solo loops). The signal is time since last real movement, not time since opened.
- Then take a rung. A stale item is just a quiet blocker — apply the ladder: block it (rung 1), demand the missing spec (rung 2), pin it as a skipped test (rung 3), or, if it no longer earns its slot, drop it (unassign / move back to the backlog) so something live can take its place.
- Don't fake activity to keep it alive. A token commit to reset the clock is the same dishonesty as faking green — the staleness is real information; surface it.
This pairs with WIP caps (yegor-simba): a stale item occupying a capped slot is exactly what must be shed before new work can start.
The one corner you must NEVER cut
Unit tests. Every other corner on the ladder is fair game under pressure; skipping tests is not. (A genuine production-down emergency is the only exception — and then the disabled test is a debt repaid in the very next task. See yegor-unit-tests.)
How Claude should use this
- When you notice yourself thrashing (repeated failed attempts, growing scope, "just one more try"), stop and announce which rung you're taking: "I'm blocked on X — taking rung 1, filing the block and moving on."
- Never silently absorb a blocker. If you can't do what was asked, say so and pick a rung. Don't quietly substitute an easier task and call it done.
- Never fabricate green. Faking a passing test, swallowing an exception, or hardcoding an expected value to make something "pass" is the exact failure mode this skill exists to prevent. A red/skipped test that tells the truth beats a green one that lies.
- Reveal early. The cost of a revealed blocker is low; the cost of a concealed one compounds. Surface it the moment you're confident you're stuck, not after an hour of grinding.
Pitfalls
- Hero mode. Grinding silently to avoid admitting you're stuck. The delay is the real failure, not the difficulty.
- Fake-it-to-green. Bending the test/code to fake success. Cutting this corner is forbidden.
- Silent scope-swap. Quietly doing an easier adjacent thing instead of the blocked task, then reporting progress.
- Skipping the rung's artifact. Every rung produces a visible artifact (a block, a question ticket, a skipped test, a proof test, a disable + re-enable ticket). No artifact = the corner was cut dishonestly.
Cross-references
yegor-microtasks — overrun is a trigger to stop and split, not to grind; this skill is what "stop" looks like.yegor-bdd — rungs 3 & 4 produce the complaint-as-test (failing/disabled, or proving-absent).yegor-pdd — the leftover work from a cut corner becomes a @todo puzzle / ticket.yegor-tickets — every rung's artifact lives in the tracker, not in your head.yegor-unit-tests — the one corner you can't cut; the emergency disable-then-repay protocol.yegor-simba — WIP caps; a stale in-progress item is what must be shed to free a capped slot.yegor-velocity — an idle item produces no closures; staleness is the absence of the metric.
Deep reference
research/philosophy_10_stuck_cut_corners.mdresearch/philosophy_19_zero_tolerance_and_stale_tickets.md (the No-Obligations stale-work rule)
