I think tools and toolmakers don't always get the credit they deserve. Tools are the other way of increasing the leverage of a team of developers (the first bei

I think tools and toolmakers don't always get the credit they deserve. Tools are the other way of increasing the leverage of a team of developers (the first being increasing the level of the team through knowledge and upskilling). It's sometimes hard to get businesses to see the benefit of building tooling, though, because it seems like a yak-shaving exercise (and can be if it's not scoped correctly). I think if you have people who are naturally inclined to be toolmakers, and they've got a problem which can be solved in two ways - repetitively, or with tooling - the deciding factor on whether they build a tool or not will be how much autonomy of decision-making they have. Tightly focused "agile" sprints will result in small packets of work, no one of which will be big enough to justify any tool building, so there won't be any space for introspection and planning, and it probably won't happen. Tooling tends not to evolve from refactoring. It has a similar genesis - seeing repetitive work - but the approach requires a couple more clicks up the abstraction stack to plan out.