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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

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1070 points dondraper36 | 2 comments | 29 Aug 25 19:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.56s | source
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codingwagie ◴[29 Aug 25 20:39 UTC] No.45069135[source]▶
I think this works in simple domains. After working in big tech for a while, I am still shocked by the required complexity. Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale. Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

A classic, Chesterton's Fence:

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”"

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sodapopcan ◴[29 Aug 25 22:30 UTC] No.45070127[source]▶
This is the classic misunderstanding where software engineers can't seem to communicate well with each other.

We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

You can't escape complexity when a problem is complex. You could certainly still complicate it even more than necessary, though. Nowhere in this article is it saying you can avoid complexity altogether, but that many of us tend to over-complicate problems for no good reason.

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1. imgabe ◴[30 Aug 25 08:27 UTC] No.45072947[source]▶
A complex system that works is always found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

You can keep on doing the simplest thing possible and arrive at something very complex, but the key is that each step should be simple. Then you are solving a real problem that you are currently experiencing, not introducing unnecessary complexity to solve a hypothetical problem you imagine you might experience.

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2. codethief ◴[01 Sep 25 03:15 UTC] No.45089116[source]▶
> the key is that each step should be simple

In other words, every time you optimize only locally and in a single dimension and potentially walk very far away from a global optimum. I have worked on such systems before. Every single step in and by itself was simpler (and also faster, less work) than doing a refactoring (to keep the overall resulting system simple), so we never dared doing the latter. Unfortunately, over time this meant that every new step would incur additional costs due to all the accidental complexity we had accumulated. Time to finally refactor and do things the right way, right? No. Because the costs of refactoring had also kept increasing with every additional step we took, and every feature we patched on. At some point no one really understood the whole system anymore. So we just kept on piling things on top of each other and prayed they would never come crashing down on us.

Then one day, business decided the database layer needed to be replaced for licensing reasons. Guess which component had permeated our entire code base because we never got around doing that refactoring and never implemented proper boundaries and interfaces between database, business and view layer. So what could have been a couple months of migration work, ended up being more than four years of work (of rewriting the entire application from scratch).