This may be slightly off-topic, but it seems to me that sometimes, YAGNI is a judgement made by someone who doesn’t have the same grasp of the problem as you do.
Most recent case in point: a good friend recently became a work colleague and peer and we work extraordinarily well together, better than any previous working relationship of mine. In addition to the maturity and battle scars that come from ~25 and ~30 years of industry experience, and very different experience, I’d say the biggest reason for this is our very complementary work styles: he is a mix of top-down and bottom-up, write some code knowing it will be replaced later, while I am a come from the side and try to get the whole thing in my head and code incrementally across the whole stack person. (He recently called me lazy, which we both knew was a compliment, but future lazy, in that I will spend more time know to avoid a rewrite later.) We both know the value and cost of technical debt, and are willing to make it good enough for now when needed, leaving comments that link to issues for later, which is good.
Anyway, I’ve been the one mostly responsible for the workflow engine, while he has done the DAOs, APIs, and front end components. More than once I’ve added a seeming YAGNI, which we’ve discussed, and which I’ve defended with vague statements and hand waving. (We trust each other enough that we don’t need complete agreement.)
More than once I’ve come to a point where I’ve told myself that I really need X only to find that weeks/months earlier I added either a comment about X or a doX() stub or even a partial, notional implementation of X.
I am very logical and very defensive in my coding, but very intuitive in my understanding of how things hang together. It took me years, perhaps even decades to accept and trust that intuition.
Sometimes a YAGNI is just something you know you will need, but cannot yet articulate the why and the how of it.
(I have also had more than a few tf was I thinking moments with code that was solid and clean and somewhere between mildly wrong (e.g., edge case mishandled) and near-wholly-borked (as in, I don’t understand how this ever worked, oh, wait it mostly doesn’t and I/we got lucky), so it isn’t all smooth and clean.)