[magnusmundus]

> the ability to scope things down to what exactly what matters

In the last few years, I started shifting my focus from what variety of cases to handle with an elaborate solution, to what possible cases I might be blocking with a simple solution. Gratuitous YAGNI was an important intermediate step in that process. It might not be very FAANG-friendly (or it might not scale to four-digits-engineers regardless of brand), but both in terms of real life performance and peer feedback, it's yielded very good results.

While the first is prone to becoming a bottomless pit of SWE-self-pleasuring; the latter is actually very useful in coming up with something that's cheap, easy and maintainable, but still flexible enough -- which doesn't necessarily mean extensible! Ease-of-refactoring is another flavor of flexibility, and that's where I found this kind of thinking beating YAGNI alone.

One actual drawback I see is that it makes DRY difficult to achieve, but the more people I work with, the more I'm becoming disillusioned with that anyway. It's such an overly adaptable dogma to generate work that is often pointless, and becomes harmful so easily. I think we found so much comfort in "don't type the same thing twice" (though I still try to keep it to 3) that we don't stop to think about "don't maintain the same information twice" anymore. But this is 3AM rambling, so I'll stop here.