Designing too far into the future

Max Kanat-Alexander has a new blog up called Code Simplicity, and I'd love it for the name alone. His latest post, "Designing Too Far Into The Future", talks about the perils of trying to predict the future and guess what your code will have to do down the road. In the XP world, the term that gets thrown around is YAGNI, for "Ya Ain't Gonna Need It." When you have to write a report and you start by writing a report generator, that's a big violation of the principle of YAGNI.