>"Hmmm... y'know in the future it might need to also do <some future thing>" Those are my trigger words. My experience is that about 97% of the time somebody s

>"Hmmm... y'know in the future it might need to also do <some future thing>" Those are my trigger words. My experience is that about 97% of the time somebody says those words (in the past it's been me) in the context of writing software and it turns out that: * <some future thing> is never required. * <some future thing> is required but it ends up being needed in a completely different form, rendering the preparation work pointless. * <some future thing> was nice to have but it ended up so far down the list of priorities that it might as well not have been. This applies to every level of the stack from one off functions to grand features, to refactoring, testing and even to things that many people consider "best practice". I don't think it pays to be an extremist about many things in software but "if there isn't a glaring need for it then don't implement it" is one of them.