[josephg]

Yes exactly.

> At each stage, the programmers takes the shortest, most straightforward approach to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, this is the often the best case. There’s a point in the life of most good programmers where they can’t help but to massively over engineering everything they make, adding pointless interfaces and abstractions everywhere, to chase the dream of reusability. This mindset will utterly bury your capacity to iterate.

I once saw a Java method trail to initialise something which was 19 levels deep - each level just making one method call to the next abstraction. You couldn’t just trace it in the IDE - lots of those calls called an interface method or something, so you had to hunt down the implementer. But it got worse. There was also a method trail alongside it for cleaning up that context. It had the same 19 levels deep trail, but after all that work the final callee was an empty function.