What's the Biggest Reason Your Side Projects Never Get Finished?

Question

We all do it. We get an amazing idea for an app, a tool, or a beautiful UI on a Friday night. We are incredibly hyped. We open our terminal, run a scaffolding command, get hit with a random dependency error, spend an hour trying to fix our local environment... and suddenly, we just don't care anymore.

The project gets dumped into a folder and is never opened again.

I’ve come to believe that most of us don't abandon side projects because our coding skills are lacking, or because the idea was inherently bad. We abandon them because we lose momentum. The friction of the setup phase literally drains the joy out of the creative process.

I've been building NitroIDE specifically to solve this for myself—creating an online code editor that acts as an instant frontend playground so I can prototype ideas before the motivation dies. But I want to hear from the community.

When you look back at your own "project graveyard," what actually killed those projects? Was it a lack of time? Over-scoping the features? Or did you just get exhausted by the boilerplate setup required in modern web development? Let's share some honest stories.