[strken]

"Know the future" is part of a software engineer's job description, at least insofar as "know" means "make informed predictions about".

Consider the case of making API calls to a third party. You, today, are writing a function that calls the remote API with some credentials, reauthenticates on auth failure, handles backoff when rate limited, and generates structured logs for outgoing calls.

You need to add a second API call. You're not sure whether to copy the existing code or create an abstraction. What do you do?

Well, in this case, you have a crystal ball! This is a common abstraction that can be identified in other code as well as your own. You don't know the future with 100% confidence, but it's your job to be able to make a pretty good guess using partial information.