KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) is a design philosophy that favors simplicity, solutions that are **as simple as possible** to achieve given task. This philosophy doesn't primarily stem from laziness and a want to save time (though these are valid reasons too), but mainly from the fact that higher [complexity](complexity.md) comes with increasingly negative effects such as the cost of development, cost of [maintenance](maintenance.md), greater probability of [bugs](bug.md) (e.g. [security](security.md) vulnerabilities) and failure, more [dependencies](dependency.md). This stance is related to technology [minimalism](minimalism.md).
Apparently the term *KISS* originated in the US Army plane engineering: the planes needed to be repairable by *stupid* soldiers with limited tools under field conditions.
- Implementing a web left-right sweeping image gallery with HTML [iframe](iframe.md) instead of some overcomplicated [JavaScript](js.md) library. { Example stolen from [reactionary software](reactionary_software.md) website. ~drummyfish }
- Using a trivial [shell](shell.md) script for compiling your programs rather than a complex build system such as [CMake](cmake.md).
Compared to [suckless](suckless.md), [unix philosophy](unix_philosophy.md) and [LRS](lrs.md), KISS is a more general term and isn't tied to any specific group or movement, it doesn't imply any specifics but rather the general overall idea of simplicity being an advantage ([less is more](less_is_more.md), [worse is better](worse_is_better.md), ...).
