Comment by zephen

> poor programmers is a belief that theyre special snowflakes who can anticipate the future.

Some of us are actually reasonably good at anticipating the future, and don't mesh well in environments where people claim to care about quality but are always deferring stuff for the next release.

> This is why no matter how many brilliant programmers scream YAGNI, dont do BDUF and dont prematurely optimize there will always be some comment saying the equivalent of "akshually sometimes you should...",

You write as if there are no brilliant people doing BDUF. This is unequivocally false.

> remembering that one time when they metaphorically rolled a double six and anticipated the necessary architecture correctly when it wasnt even necessary to do so.

You've doubled down on the gambling trope. Any development is gambling. Thinking otherwise is foolish.

Sure, people who live and breathe YAGNI gamble in different ways, but they still gamble. I can't count the number of times I've made the statement "but if this happens and then that happens, it will be bad" which was countered with "but what are the chances of that?"

Look, if you have to ask, the probability of it being a problem at the customer approaches one.

My personal solution?

I went to work for chip companies. Chip companies have to put a stake in the ground and work to build something that they will be able to sell as designed and implemented.

This doesn't mean that there isn't a triage for features, or the potential for feature creep, or that there isn't a triage for the most important bugs right before tapeout, but the process that works and gets you a chip that customers will use is much closer to what people call BDUF than it is YAGNI.