> if you had the ability to build a system that was initially structured well enough such that it could be made to last indefinitely If you could have that, it

> if you had the ability to build a system that was initially structured well enough such that it could be made to last indefinitely If you could have that, it would obviously be amazing. Do you (or anyone) have that ability though? So far it seems the answer is no. People are just not smart enough to predict the future. As a more nuanced answer, a system that is scalable enough to grow to 1000x the current load is usually way too expensive to build with the resources you have "right now". The best you can do is build a system for 10-100x the current load and hope you haven't forgotten any edge cases, but usually you encounter them way sooner than 10x the load. Building so that you can easily refactor your current system is the way to go, but even then you will sooner or later run into problems your original design did not consider.