Architecture & practice·Judgement and reasoning traps
someone asked how to parse a filename with a regex, and what they actually needed was the file's creation date.
XY problem
Asking about your attempted solution rather than about your actual problem, so the help you get is help with the wrong thing. It wastes an enormous amount of time in code review, support channels and design discussions, and it is invisible from the inside. The habit that defeats it is stating the underlying goal in the first message, and, when helping, asking what someone is ultimately trying to do.