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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Yagni only applies to capabilities built into the software to support a presumptive feature, it does not apply to effort to make the software easier to modify.

And here is where the actual frontlines of the battle are fought--because it's needlessly verbose and abstract architectures (or what people think are them, anyways) that are railed against by folks chanting "yagni yagni yagni".

This article neatly sidesteps the actual thorny issue of "well, when is designing extra actual a good idea?" by ignoring one of the biggest use-cases of yagni.

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I hear you, I think this article is really good for someone who isn't familiar with the term YAGNI. However as the above poster mentioned it sidesteps a big issue which is when YAGNI is wrong.

Generally I feel like YAGNI is appropriate for features but not appropriate for architecture. I feel like the purpose of architecture is to try to plan ahead, or to make the determination how far ahead one is attempting to plan. Its perfectly find to architecturally choose not to support something, but it should be a conscious decision.

If I may extend your metaphor, the problem then becomes the scaffolding that lies between architecture and features. Another attempt at a rule of thumb is to ask the question: can I describe how this likely-but-not-yet-needed change would be addressed in the code? If there's no answer (or the answer is not satisfactory), the question becomes: what do I need to do to have a good answer to the previous question? And so on.

This is just my experience, but "YAGNI" is often shorthand for "I don't want to think about it." I'm not talking about criticisms of wasteful design/features, but somebody actually saying "YAGNI" with little elaboration. It's imprecise and lazy.

Yep.

I especially hate hearing it from well-meaning folks who, say, bring it up whenever talking about architecture decisions and devops stuff, but apparently see no reason not to spend one or two weeks fiddling around making The World's Best Angular Form Field Input Directive, or painstakingly tweaking the secondary and tertiary colors in their alert boxes or some damn fool thing.

EDIT:

At this point, especially in the web, I'm now considering Diarrhea Driven Development: shit out as much as fast as you can and make it as viral and sticky as possible.

Agreed -- the article cleanly argues for Yagni by moving the heart of the discussion to a bolded sentence near the end.

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