Every project begins with a plan that fits on one sticky note. Every project ends with a pile of sticky notes larger than the desk. This is not a management problem or a communication problem. It is a law of physics.

You draw the scope. You get signoff. You estimate the work. Then the world notices your plan exists.

The cycle every engineer lives through

Scope creep is not caused by bad stakeholders. It is caused by the honest and reasonable fact that once a thing starts to exist, every adjacent problem becomes visible. A login screen is a login screen until someone sees it. Then it also needs to handle password reset, and social providers, and remembered devices, and device trust scores, and audit logging, and internationalisation, and dark mode.

None of those are unreasonable. All of them added together are a six-month project wearing the name tag of a two-week one. The MVP was real. The MVP also quietly died three Tuesdays ago and nobody held a funeral.

What helps (beyond laughing at yourself)

The only reliable defence against scope creep is a bias toward shipping a narrow thing and iterating visibly. Tools that do exactly one thing and do it well are an antidote to the instinct to pack every feature into one page:

Video to MP3 Converter extracts audio and stops. It does not translate it, transcribe it, or upsell you on a subscription mid-file. That focus is the feature.
Voice Separator isolates speakers and hands you the output. Every extra button on that tool was a feature we consciously cut.
More comics from this series — because if we keep shipping them, we know what works.

The comic is funny because it is true. The true part is that you will do this again next quarter. Maybe schedule the next funeral in advance.