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Comment by fmbb | Hacker News Reader

All tech debt I have ever seen in my 15 years of professional software development has been someone building too many abstractions or generalizations trying to future proof stuff.

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That's interesting, because it's not my experience. A lot of the technical debt I see is that someone half-assed something thinking it would be easy to improve later, but the layer violations and inadequate tests make doing so a massive project, once it's become load-bearing.

That’s the opposite of the typical definition of tech debt.

Usually tech debt is debt—-ie something you take on to ship faster now at the expense of paying it in the long run.

The tech debt comes after the implementation of the many abstractions. Instead of removing them (which can be really hard), you take the easy option of following the complex design, which also make the removal incrementally harder.

Unused abstractions are tech debt, whether they were previously used or (even worse) never used. They constrain and complicated the addition of other features and abstractions within the code. It's almost always easier to start with a codebase that is simpler and with fewer abstractions and take it in a given direction than it is one with lots of abstractions which don't suit the direction you want to take it. (and of course, everyone imagines that their abstractions will be in the right direction, but this is rarely the case). Unused abstractions are pure waste, because they take effort to make and effort to remove and never produce any value.

I would say: if the feature is from a developer, high probability of YAGNI, if the feature is from a user, medium probability of YAGNI.

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