7 posts tagged “yagni”
YAGNI stands for You Aren't Gonna Need It.
2026
It is hard for less experienced developers to appreciate how rarely architecting for future requirements / applications turns out net-positive.
— John Carmack, a tweet in June 2021
Writing code is cheap now
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full day or more. Many of our engineering habits, at both the macro and micro level, are built around this core constraint.
At the macro level we spend a great deal of time designing, estimating and planning out projects, to ensure that our expensive coding time is spent as efficiently as possible. Product feature ideas are evaluated in terms of how much value they can provide in exchange for that time - a feature needs to earn its development costs many times over to be worthwhile! [... 661 words]
2021
PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its
Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions.
[... 1,289 words]YAGNI exceptions (via) Luke Plant provides his collection of things that you probably ARE going to need in a project, where adding them later is painful enough that it’s worth the up-front investment. I really like these as a concept, and I’m coining the term PAGNI—for Probably Are Gonna Need It—to describe them.
2012
Which core programming principles apply to all languages?
YAGNI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You...
[... 17 words]2004
Defending YAGNI. I’ve been learning to say YAGNI recently.
2003
YAGNI and DRY
Two acronyms that have been seeing a lot of action at work recently are YAGNI and DRY. They’re great principles to go by in any case, but in a pair programming environment they take on a whole new level of utility.
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