> This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something,

> This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. You can also turn this around: Maybe software craftsmanship is not about writing great code (for the reasons you mentioned; the article also doesn't phrase it that way), but about skillfully using existing tools. Peek into the open source libraries you use, disassemble the closed-source ones, take your time to really understand that occasional bug. There are many tools that rarely change (extreme examples: Unix, RDBMS, programming languages), and grokking them is not something that can be productized. Yet I see few people/businesses making that investment; it's easier in the short term to treat everything as a black box and add more abstraction glue, and that's what I see many people/businesses do.