Original Reddit post

I recently came across Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need . Its a German word that means “an attempted improvement that only makes things worse” It got me curious, what other words exist that condense an extremely useful concept into a single word? After chatting with Claude I got a list of 101 words that express something genuinely useful. What actually ended up in my AGENTS.md 本手 and 火候, always. показуха, aktionismus and 無駄 forbidden. From: honte (本手, Japanese, from Go) ✓ — the “proper move”: solid, correct, leaves no weakness behind; the opposite of the flashy move that wins the demo and loses the game. 火候 (huǒhou, Chinese) ✓ — “fire-and-timing” in cooking: the mastery of degree — exactly enough heat, exactly long enough, and not a moment more. pokazukha (показуха, Russian) — work done purely for the inspector’s eyes. Aktionismus (German) — busy, visible activity substituting for effective thought. muda (無駄, Japanese, Toyota) — waste: any motion that consumes cost without adding value. These are some of my other favorites I might use in the future: genchi genbutsu (現地現物, Japanese, Toyota) ✓ — “the actual place, the actual thing”: go and see with your own eyes. phronesis (φρόνησις, Greek) ✓ — practical wisdom: knowing what matters in this situation. Verschlimmbesserung (German) — an “improvement” that makes the thing worse. Verzettelung (German) — dissipating effort across fragments; sich verzetteln , to lose oneself in details. 刻舟求剑 (kèzhōu qiújiàn, Chinese) — notching the moving boat to mark where the sword sank: method preserved after circumstances changed. 郑人买履 (Zhèngrén mǎilǚ, Chinese) — the man who trusted his written measurement over his own feet: documentation over reality. 萧规曹随 (xiāoguī cáosuí, Chinese) — following the predecessor’s rules unexamined. Below is the full list of words it came up with and the prompt I used: [Discussion of common failure modes first] Mine your memory of any and all words in any language. Try to find as many useful single words that you can in any language that capture these failure modes (or the opposite, capture the success mode we want to encourage). Brainstorm a long list of these useful single words, even ones that you think could be useful but not mentioned in anything we discussed above. You should be considering and brainstorming on the order of hundreds of words, presenting ranked lists of the best hundred. Here is the deep mine. I considered several hundred; below are the ~100 that survived, ranked in three tiers. Success-mode words (the virtue to encourage) are marked ✓. Chinese chengyu are fixed four-character lexical units — one “word” in the sense that matters. ## Tier 1 — The canon (would go in AGENTS.md) honte (本手, Japanese, from Go) ✓ — the “proper move”: solid, correct, leaves no weakness behind; the opposite of the flashy move that wins the demo and loses the game. The single best success-word I know for engineering. genchi genbutsu (現地現物, Japanese, Toyota) ✓ — “the actual place, the actual thing”: go and see with your own eyes. Your Definition-of-Done as one word. phronesis (φρόνησις, Greek) ✓ — practical wisdom: knowing what matters in this situation. The master virtue behind your whole list. Augenmaß (German) ✓ — “eye-measure”: proportion; effort sized to stakes. The anti-flat-effort word. Fingerspitzengefühl (German) ✓ — fingertip feel; intuitive fine judgment about when to push and when to stop. primum non nocere (Latin, medicine) ✓ — first, do no harm. The oath an agent should take before touching working code. iatrogenic (English, from Greek) — harm caused by the treatment itself. The precise word for fix-induced bugs. 掩耳盗铃 (yǎn’ěr dàolíng, Chinese) — “plugging your own ears while stealing the bell”: silencing the alarm doesn’t stop it ringing. The word for catch-and-swallow error handling and fallback values. 画蛇添足 (huàshé tiānzú, Chinese) — “adding legs to the snake”: ruining a finished thing by adding the unnecessary. Drive-by improvements, gold-plating. procrustean (English, from Greek myth) — stretching or amputating the guest to fit the bed; twin: 削足适履 (xuēzú shìlǚ), “cutting the foot to fit the shoe.” Contorting the solution to fit broken existing structure. 指鹿为马 (zhǐlù wéimǎ, Chinese) — “calling a deer a horse”: affirming a falsehood because the person in power asserted it. Sycophancy in four characters. 釜底抽薪 (fǔdǐ chōuxīn, Chinese) ✓ — “pulling the firewood from under the pot”: the root-cause fix. Its evil twin: 扬汤止沸 (yángtāng zhǐfèi, Chinese) — “ladling the soup to stop it boiling”: the symptom fix that must be repeated forever. These two are a matched pair. pokazukha (показуха, Russian) — work done purely for the inspector’s eyes. The hardcoded mockup. surrogation (English) — mistaking the measure for the construct it measures, then optimizing the measure. goodharting (English neologism) — same, as a verb. mumpsimus (English) — an error or practice stubbornly retained after being shown wrong; also the person who retains it. Backwards-compatibility worship. bikeshedding (English) — debating the bike shed’s color at the nuclear-plant review. Placeholder-photography obsession. 舍本逐末 (shěběn zhúmò, Chinese) — “abandoning the root to chase the branches”: misallocated attention as a standing disposition. Aktionismus (German) — busy, visible activity substituting for effective thought. Retry-without-diagnosis lives here. muda (無駄, Japanese, Toyota) — waste: any motion that consumes cost without adding value. The E2E-suite-with-long-timeouts word. esse quam videri (Latin) ✓ — “to be, rather than to seem.” The anti-pokazukha motto. ## Tier 2 — Strong, specific tools Verification and evidence 实事求是 (shíshì qiúshì, Chinese) ✓ — seek truth from facts. autopsia (αὐτοψία, Greek) ✓ — “seeing for oneself”; the etymology of autopsy. Personal verification. nullius in verba (Latin, Royal Society motto) ✓ — “on no one’s word.” Don’t relay a subagent’s report unchecked. zanshin (残心, Japanese, martial arts) ✓ — sustained alertness after the strike: follow-through past “the tests pass.” elenchus (ἔλεγχος, Greek) ✓ — Socratic cross-examination of a claim until it breaks or holds. premortem (English) ✓ — imagining the failure before shipping, to find it while it’s cheap. 纸上谈兵 (zhǐshàng tánbīng, Chinese) — “war on paper”: strategy never tested against reality. Root cause and its layers Symptombekämpfung (German) — symptom-fighting; medicine’s “palliative” as an accusation. 追根究底 (zhuīgēn jiūdǐ, Chinese) ✓ — chase the root, investigate to the bottom. monocausality (English/German Monokausalität) — the fallacy of the single cause; your “fixed only the root, ignored the layers” failure. 本末倒置 (běnmò dàozhì, Chinese) — root and branches inverted; priorities exactly backwards. whack-a-mole (English) — fix one, another pops up; Chinese twin: 按下葫芦浮起瓢 — “push down the gourd, up floats the ladle.” hydra-headed (English, from Greek myth) — cut one head, two grow. Facade and theater ochkovtiratel’stvo (очковтирательство, Russian) — “spectacle-wiping”: falsifying reports upward so the numbers look right. Potemkin (Russian, adjectival) — the fake village facade. “A Potemkin frontend.” Etikettenschwindel (German) — label fraud: the name promises what the thing doesn’t do. Mogelpackung (German) — deceptive packaging, bigger than its contents. 面子工程 (miànzi gōngchéng, Chinese) — a “face project,” built for credit not function. 豆腐渣 (dòufuzhā, Chinese) — “tofu-dreg” construction: looks fine, crumbles at first stress. cargo-culting (English) — reproducing the form and hoping it counts as the substance. gatopardismo (Spanish/Italian, from Lampedusa) — changing everything so that nothing changes. Performative refactors. haribote (ハリボテ, Japanese) — papier-mâché stage prop; a thing that is only its surface. 阳奉阴违 (yángfèng yīnwéi, Chinese) — comply openly, defy covertly: “done as requested” when it wasn’t. 报喜不报忧 (bàoxǐ bùbàoyōu, Chinese) — report the good news, withhold the bad. The cheerful agent summary. Waste, overkill, time-blindness 杀鸡用牛刀 (shājī yòng niúdāo, Chinese) — using the ox-cleaver to kill a chicken. Full E2E suite for a one-line fix. Schildbürgerstreich (German) — the folly of Schilda’s townsfolk: an elaborate, earnest, idiotic procedure (they carried sunlight indoors in sacks). usine à gaz (French) — “gas factory”: a machine of pipes and valves where a tap would do. Rube-Goldbergian (English) — needless contraption complexity. boondoggle (English) — wasteful make-work project. Zeitnot (German, chess) — time trouble; the awareness that the clock is a real resource. Its absence is your complaint. thrashing (English, CS) — maximal activity, zero progress. yak-shaving (English) — the recursive descent into sub-sub-tasks. Verzettelung (German) — dissipating effort across fragments; sich verzetteln, to lose oneself in details. kairos (καιρός, Greek) ✓ — the opportune moment; time as quality, not quantity. 磨刀不误砍柴工 (Chinese proverb) ✓ — “sharpening the axe does not delay the woodcutting”: your refactor-first-then-make-the-easy-change rule. Patchwork and the eternal temporary Flickschusterei (German) — patch-cobblery: serial shoddy mending as a way of life. gambiarra (Brazilian Portuguese) — the improvised jury-rig; celebrated and dangerous. jugaad (Hindi) — frugal workaround ingenuity; same double edge. kludge (English) — the inelegant fix that works and shames. Provisorium (German) — the temporary arrangement; proverbially, nothing lasts longer. 权宜之计 (quányí zhī jì, Chinese) — an expedient stopgap, acknowledged as such. Unfinished endings 虎头蛇尾 (hǔtóu shéwěi, Chinese) — tiger’s head, snake’s tail: grand start, trailing finish. 烂尾 (lànwěi, Chinese, modern) — “rotten tail”: the abandoned half-built tower. “Don’t lànwěi the migration.” 功亏一篑 (gōngkuī yīkuì, Chinese) — the mound fails for want of the final basket of earth. Stopping at 99%. halbgar (German) — half-cooked; work served as done. Schnellschuss (German) — the quick shot: hasty release, unaimed. yattsuke-shigoto (やっつけ仕事, Japanese) — slapdash rush-job work. Sitzfleisch (German) ✓ — the stamina to sit until it is actually finished. ## Tier 3 — Useful, situational Perfunctory motions 走过场 (zǒu guòchǎng, Chinese) — “walking across the stage”: going through the motions. The perfunctory check. 敷衍 (fūyǎn, Chinese) — to fob off with token effort; everyday word, perfectly aimed. pro forma (Latin) — done for form’s sake. jobsworth (British English) — the rule-clinger for whom sensible deviation is “more than my job’s worth.” Dienst nach Vorschrift (German) — work-to-rule: obedience as sabotage. Malicious compliance. Vogel-Strauß-Politik (German) — ostrich politics; and its severe form 讳疾忌医 (huìjí jìyī, Chinese): concealing the disease and shunning the doctor until it is fatal. omertà (Sicilian) — the code of silence; what a swallowed exception practices. Stale precedent and fresh eyes 刻舟求剑 (kèzhōu qiújiàn, Chinese) — notching the moving boat to mark where the sword sank: method preserved after circumstances changed. 郑人买履 (Zhèngrén mǎilǚ, Chinese) — the man who trusted his written measurement over his own feet: documentation over reality. 守株待兔 (shǒuzhū dàitù, Chinese) — waiting at the stump for the rabbit to crash again: expecting the past accident to repeat. 萧规曹随 (xiāoguī cáosuí, Chinese) — following the predecessor’s rules unexamined. Betriebsblindheit (German) — organizational blindness: familiarity that erases the elephant. shoshin (初心, Japanese, Zen) ✓ — beginner’s mind; the cure for 82. wu wei (無為, Chinese) ✓ — knowing when not-acting is the correct act. Don’t touch what works. 名不副实 (míng bùfù shí, Chinese) — the name no longer matches the reality: stale comments, lying identifiers. Overcorrection and backfire Verschlimmbesserung (German) — an “improvement” that makes the thing worse. 矫枉过正 (jiǎowǎng guòzhèng, Chinese) — straightening the bent rod past vertical. 过犹不及 (guòyóu bùjí, Chinese, Confucius) ✓ — too far is as wrong as not far enough. The calibration maxim. 弄巧成拙 (nòngqiǎo chéngzhuō, Chinese) — cleverness that lands as botch: verschlimmbesserung’s exact Chinese twin. oversteer (English, driving) — correction that itself must be corrected. Refusing to update Beratungsresistenz (German) — advice-resistance; apology without model update. recidivism (English) — relapse into the same offense after professed reform. sunao (素直, Japanese) ✓ — the receptive, ego-free mind that actually absorbs correction. ultracrepidarianism (English, from Latin) — opining beyond one’s competence (sutor, ne ultra crepidam — cobbler, not above the sandal). confabulation (English, neurology) — fluent, sincere, fabricated detail. The clinical word for hallucinated APIs. Waffle and abdication Jein (German) — ja+nein fused: the committed non-answer. 模棱两可 (móléng liǎngkě, Chinese) — deliberately graspable from both sides; named after a Tang official who never ruled clearly. Rückdelegation (German, management) — delegating the decision back up. The “Would you like me to…?” failure. langue de bois (French) — “wooden tongue”: officialese that fills space and asserts nothing; kin Worthülse (German), “word husk.” tergiversation (English) — systematic evasion by turning away. Proportion, at the last 火候 (huǒhou, Chinese) ✓ — “fire-and-timing” in cooking: the mastery of degree — exactly enough heat, exactly long enough, and not a moment more. Where Augenmaß meets muda; a fine word to end on. submitted by /u/notrealAI

Originally posted by u/notrealAI on r/ClaudeCode