My favorite interview question (which I formulated but never asked anyone - yet!) is why copy pasting code (when reusing it) is better than refactoring.
If you feel disgusted, or can't answer, you're a midwit.
Copy pasted code never breaks anything that already works. Copy pasted code adapts to the task at hand, letting the internal structure of the problem show through, instead of enforcing an external structure. Copy pasted code is antifragile - it learns.
I've know this for a decade now, but still haven't been able to get myself to do it fully in practice. Surely there is reason why my obsessing over details, over well architected abstractions, over minimal primitives that compose well, is important?
It is just cope, I think. Copy pasting is how nature works. You and I share the same DNA, but not really. We have copies.
The reason I've not been able to fully embrace this learning is because I don't know how to make it sit with Whitehead's conjecture: that civilization grows when we manipulate symbols higher, higher, at ever dizzying heights where they lose any connection with what they once stood for, until they stand for other symbols which had eons ago lost any connection thus.
If there was only copy pasting, then there is no selection pressure to abstract, and without abstraction, the symbols I copy paste will not gain mana.
How can I copy paste yet embue the thing being copy pasted more leverage over reality?
I think cargo culting by a observant enough intelligence (mechanical or otherwise) might be the way abstraction can arise out of copy pasting, assuming there are enough selection pressures that reward abstraction (for example, efficiency, faster adaption, bigger jumps).
Even in the arts, emulation is a tried and tested way - walk the path of the masters, not to reach their destination, but until one sees where they were trying to reach for. Hunter Thompson famously retyped entire novels to learn the mechanics of writing.
So I copy and paste until I understand what needs to be copy and pasted, and why. Rinse, Repeat.