I have spent more time in my career than many people think is healthy trying to plot out contingency plans for 'what if' situations. It stops being irritating the moment the building is on fire and all of a sudden people want to listen to me.
My relationship with YAGNI has ebbed and flowed over the years, and as with any 'problematic' relationship, you may or may not see your own relationship clearly but people who have it worse are still easy to identify. Whether you then ask if you're like that is a matter of wisdom.
What we hear about, what we interview about, what we write about is these cool huge projects from the heroes we want, but the heroes we need are the people who figure out how to solve problems in ways that leave the option of solving them differently in the future. It's a little dangerous to say things like that out loud because lots of people hear that as "I'm going to build a configuration engine that I can use to swap out implementations at startup/runtime," which is pretty much the merry-go-round we are all stuck on half the time.
No, what I mean is go back way old school, taking some notes from Bertrand Meyer, and arranging your code so that there are 'spots' where major changes in functionality seem to naturally fit. I may have mangled this story in my head over the years into a parable, but I still recall hearing my uncles waxing poetic about, the Chevy straight 6 engine block that was popular during the height of the muscle car era. This engine did not have a particularly high horse power to displacement ratio. But in those days engine bays were fairly empty, and the Straight 6 was overbuilt just enough that it was a dream to modify it, and easy enough to work on that many people did. They bored it out for higher displacement, modified it for higher compression ratios (naturally aspirated or blown), hung additional accessories off of it, you name it. Many people were running around with cars that had over 50% more horse power than the stock version, and some crazy bastards who went considerably higher.
In short, this engine was not that particularly great, but it was full of potential.
As someone who may or may not become the next Google, (it's been a long time since I worked for anyone who shared opinions like that, when Google was smaller and only dreamed of being as big as they are now), I don't want a system full of features. I want a system full of possibilities. IF we wanted to do this, you would add it here, and verify it here. But we don't, not yet, so if you could just not break 'here' please, that would be great.
Nobody is collecting those stories and patterns. They're hidden away in Meyer, Fowler, dropped as throw-away lines in lectures, and discussed at length over coffee, noodles, or beers but never written down. Elsewhere they are really hidden in older aphorisms like 'premature optimization', "single responsibility" and that ilk, so much so that they risk becoming bad advice.