The corollary to this, which took me a few more years to shake off, was that building a code edifice may not effect any useful change to the world or produce an

The corollary to this, which took me a few more years to shake off, was that building a code edifice may not effect any useful change to the world or produce anything worthy of reuse. It's all very sensitive to the context you wrote it in, the design the code serves, and so on. A lot of value is built on simple automations that you could describe with a few lines of script - in those cases, an already existing design is doing the thing you wanted. The heavy lifting happens only after you need a new design.