vanity-engineering-review
Vanity Engineering Review
A diagnostic skill that identifies code, architecture, and technical decisions built to impress rather than to ship. Vanity engineering is entropy disguised as craftsmanship — it increases complexity without proportional capability gain, and it compounds maintenance cost while delivering zero additional user value.
Core Premise
The only legitimate purpose of engineering is to solve a problem someone actually has.
Everything else — elegant abstractions nobody traverses, microservices that serve one endpoint, custom frameworks that replicate existing tools, type systems more complex than the domain they model — is vanity. It may feel productive. It is not.
This skill does not oppose quality, rigour, or good engineering. It opposes engineering that exists to satisfy the builder rather than the user.