This quote striked me hard.
It's from the book Hypermedia Systems by Carson Gross, Adam Stepinski and Deniz Akşimşek.
I'm putting it here for future reference.
Any software project has a complexity budget, explicit or not: there is only so much complexity a given development team can tolerate and every new feature and implementation choice adds at least a bit more to the overall complexity of the system.
What is particularly nasty about complexity is that it tends to grow exponentially: one day you can keep the entire system in your head and understand the ramifications of a particular change, and a week later the whole system seems intractable. Even worse, efforts to help control complexity, such as introducing abstractions or infrastructure to manage the complexity, often end up making things even more complex. Truly, the job of the good software engineer is to keep complexity under control.
The sure-fire way to keep complexity down is also the hardest: say no. Pushing back on feature requests is an art and, if you can learn to do it well, making people feel like they said no, you will go far.
Sadly this is not always possible: some features will need to be built. At this point the question becomes: “what is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” Understanding the possibilities available in the hypermedia approach will give you another tool in your “simplest thing” tool chest.
Joint