"Delivering this feature goes against everything I know to be right and true. And I will sooner lay you into this barren earth, than entertain your folly for a moment longer."
That’s the only way I would utter it — if I can then sit down and so do it. If I am asking someone else to do I would ask them to tell me how hard it would be and if they need help or if they suggest a different approach.
I once worked at a place where one of the partners consistently claimed the engineering team over-built and over-thought everything (reality: almost everything was under-engineered and hanging on by a thread.)
His catch phrase was "all you gotta do is [insert dumb idea here.]"
It was anxiety inducing for a while, then it turned into a big joke amongst the engineering staff, where we would compete to come up with the most ridiculous "all you gotta do is ..." idea.
Similar to my experience doing low-level systems work, being prodded by a "manager" with a fifth of my experience. No, I'm not going to implement something you heard about from a candidate in an interview, an individual whom we passed on within the first 30 minutes. No, you reading out the AI overview of a google search to me for a problem that I've thought about for days ain't gonna work, nor will it get us closer to a solution. Get the fuck out of the way.
I'm there right now at my current job. It's always the same engineer, and they always get a pass because (for some reason) they don't have to do design reviews for anything they do, but they go concern-troll everyone else's designs.
Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve this particular component. This engineer got invited, and spent thr entire allocated meeting time spreading FUD about all the options we gathered. Management decided on inaction.
People think management sucks at hiring good talent (which is sometimes true, but I have worked with some truly incredible people), but one of the most consistent and costly mistakes I’ve observed over my career has been management's poor ability to identify and fire nuisance employees.
I don’t mean people who “aren't rockstars” or people for whom some things take too long, or people who get things wrong occasionally (we all do).
I mean people who, like you describe, systemically undermine the rest of the team’s work.
I’ve been on teams where a single person managed to derail an entire team’s delivery for the better part of a year, despite the rest of the team screaming at management that this person was taking huge shortcuts, trying to undermine other people’s designs in bad faith, bypassing agreed-upon practices and rules and then lying about it, pushing stuff to production without understanding it, etc.
Management continued to deflect and defer until the team lead and another senior engineer ragequit over management’s inaction and we missed multiple deadlines at which point they started to realize we weren’t just making this up for fun.
EDIT: In the context of infinite pixel tweaking, layout tweaking, and of course, new features that would require significant full stack rework