[WillAdams]

There's a similar story about a progression of robot repair devices --- which has to end in a "Master Robot Repairman" profession which is the folks who repair the robots which repair other robots.

Blanking on author and title, but read it a _long_ while ago, and it had a distinctly golden age feel --- maybe Murray Leinster?

[dcminter]

There's something a little like this in Strata by Pratchett (which is lightly sending up Niven's Ringworld and a non-robot-related but similar idea there).