Create More Work

Ah, the classic developer trap. Client says "just change this one button color" and suddenly you're staring at 5-year-old legacy code thinking "who wrote this abomination and why did they hate future-me so much?" That innocent "simple change request" always reveals the technical debt lurking in the shadows, and before you know it, you've convinced yourself that rewriting the entire module is the only reasonable option. The real joke? Your estimation of "2 hours" just became "2 weeks" and management still doesn't understand why.