I love picking apart some tiny piece of code at work. You see how subtly broken and can't help but think: "Man, how fucked up are the other million lines?!" We all had that idea. 

And when we finally get the whole job done and the system is happy, all our friends rejoice over how wonderful the code is. But most of them don't really care about the big picture, but only about that little piece of code at the end (or in the middle or at the top). We all love it; we've seen other people do it over and over again, and they can't find a flaw (I bet there are many in our own teams).

How do programmers improve? The answer is: "More", but mostly "less." That's the first thing to remember. 

We're not getting any more features and more time, so we can't do more with our existing tools. They're just too old to be helpful or usefull right now. What can we do? Well, we're probably never going to get them, but we can keep improving.