Yagri: You are gonna read it

YAGRI: You are gonna read it April, 2025 YAGNI, or, You aren't gonna need it, is a standard piece of advice that warns against over engineering and building too many features too early. I think its great and saves you from wasting time, which can kill a project. However, there's an exception that I call YAGRI, or, "You are gonna read it". It means that you shouldn't just store the minimum data required to satisfy the current product spec. You should also store data that you'll highly likely use (read), such as timestamps and contextual metadata. This problem tends to happen when a UI design shows that you only need to display a few specific bits of data to the user, so you only store those exact fields in the database. You've satisfied the design and ship it. Then later you realize you're missing valuable information to help debug an issue, do internal analytics, etc. As an example, this commonly occurs when implementing a feature to let users delete something. The easy way is to ... Read full article.