[mattv8]

This is a great article, and I largely agree but I feel like we're giving ourselves an excuse to be lazy. Because I've absolutely seen this principle swing in the opposite direction, where someone writes slop code, without ever having had a real conversation with the end user(s) and consequently the software goes out the door without having considered top 5 most common edge cases that would have been so obvious if a little more effort had been put in.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's easier to fix underengineering than overengineering so I still err on the side of the former.

[michalc]

Have to admit the lazy thing threw me, but I can see how the “doing less” I’m arguing for could be taken that way. The “less” is not about avoiding handling edge cases that are possible now, but about avoiding putting in layers of code to handle cases possible only in some future versions of the code (with some limited exceptions that I mention at the bottom of the post)

In fact, it’s crossing my mind that people might not want to be accused of being lazy, and that is a motivation to over-engineer solutions.