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Kent Beck clarifies that the YAGNI principle is not about saving coding effort but about avoiding the costs of speculative structure—building code before it's needed. He argues that even correct guesses incur a penalty because they remove the option to build the right structure later.
Dietrich Gebert open-sourced Ponytail, a tool that makes coding agents write minimal code by enforcing rules like YAGNI and preferring standard library or native features, cutting API costs by 47-77% and code size by 80-94%.