alt Hacker NewsAnd honestly, even then YAGNI might still win.
There's a big opportunity cost involved in optimizing prematurely. 9/10 times you're wasting your time, and you may have found product-market fit faster if you had spent that time trying out other feature ideas instead.
If you hit a point where you have to do a painful migration because your product is succeeding that's a point to be celebrated in my opinion. You might never have got there if you'd spent more time on optimistic scaling work and less time iterating towards the right set of features.
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Yeah the "only if" is more like a "necessary, not sufficient." The future migration pain had better be extremely bad to worry about it so far in advance.
Or it should be a well defined problem. It's easier to determine the right solution after you've already encountered the problem, maybe in a past project. If you're unsure, just keep your options open.
I think I see this point now. I thought of YAGNI as, "don't ever over-engineer because you get it wrong a lot of the time" but really, "don't over-engineer out of the gate and be thankful if you get a chance to come back and do it right later". That fits my case exactly, and that's what we did (and it wasn't actually that painful to migrate).