How Delaying Hard Design Decisions Led to Better Software Abstractions

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The creator of InversifyJS reflects on a counterintuitive engineering habit developed while building the dependency injection library: deliberately postponing complex design problems rather than forcing premature solutions. Instead of stopping to architect abstractions when a problem felt unclear, he continued implementing simpler, well-understood features and left difficult challenges untouched. Over time, this approach caused hard problems to effectively dissolve — not because of sudden insight, but because incremental development reshaped the system itself, making the right abstractions emerge naturally. This experience aligns with Gall's Law, which states that working complex systems invariably evolve from simpler working ones, rather than being designed as complex systems from the outset. The author argues that collecting concrete implementation evidence before committing to abstractions is a defining trait of sound software design.

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