DreamOfEngineeringMastery

Elsewhere, I wrote this:

To build steadily on our abilities, step by step: that is the goal of engineering.

That is, the way we'd like to write code is to have each piece added strictly increase our leverage over the problems at hand without cutting off any future opportunities or possibilities.

Of course, what we often get in practice is the opposite, CodeIsALiability. Seemingly inevitably, we add code in a way that cuts off the potential for certain types of future change.