In improvisational comedy and brainstorming there is a principle of “Yes, and…” where people are encouraged to accept and build upon every new idea and suggestion.

With software development, these suggestions come in the form of feature requests and, for OSS projects, pull requests. And why wouldn’t you want your product to have more features?

Unfortunately, “Yes, and…” for software development can be dangerous. Instead of making your product better it kill it.

Saying “Yes, and…” leads to scope creep. Projects become bloated with features that were never part of the original plan. This is even worse if you never really had a plan in the first place.

Without a strong product vision, or a clear roadmap, it’s easy to take well meaning ideas and suggestions and merge every one of them into your product. The thing that usually stops this happening is the effort of doing so. Reviewing and merging pull requests, or implementing new feature request, takes time.

At least…it used to take time.

In a world of AI, LLMs, and coding agents, the cost of implementing and merging every well-intentioned suggestion has dropped significantly. It’s easier than ever to say “Yes, and…” and bolt another feature on. You can sit back and relax while your coding agent makes your product into a bloated and unwieldy mess.

In an age of agentic software development it is more important than ever to have a clear vision, a direction, and a strong opinion on where you want to go and what your software is aiming to achieve.

Use your vision and roadmap to say “no”.

In fact, if you write the vision and roadmap and put them in your repo you can use that coding agent to evaluate suggestions, and craft polite ways to say “no”.

Your product will be better off for it.