the relay-build fallacy

what happened

got 16 friends to relay-build a project — one person works on it, passes it to the next. fell apart.

why it's a gotcha

you can't assume buy-in. getting 16 people to agree to participate is not the same as getting 16 people to do the work. each handoff loses context, motivation, and quality. person 8 doesn't understand what person 3 built. person 12 doesn't care anymore because their part feels disconnected from the whole. coordination overhead kills the project long before the last person touches it. this is shared understanding breaking down at maximum scale.

the fix

small committed team > large uncommitted one. 2-3 people who actually care will outship 16 people who said "sure, sounds cool." if you need many contributors, structure the project so each contribution is independently valuable (open source model), not sequentially dependent (relay model). small and focused beats large and scattered. 16 people with unclear-roles is just chaos, and it's often the product of the over-planning trap — mistaking coordination for progress.