This is another one of the factors that makes development time estimates difficult. While adding/removing/improving the code, you realize that some part of the code needs to be abstracted/duplicated, or vice versa. And this could take unknown amount of time to get it done.
Also, this is where the technical dept incurs over time, if the abstraction/duplication is held off.
Third party libraries, copy & pasted code from Internet, helper functions from a framework, and more often hides critical information the coder needs to be aware. Many inexperienced coders simply put together code and produces working code without good understanding of why/how their code works.
I found that deeper understanding of the code not on the first level but all the underlying libraries and functions, lets me write more concise, bug resistant, and easy to understand/maintainable code.
At Cosmic(http://www.cosmic-api.com/), we are working toward making web APIs more consistent and easier to build/consume with higher level framework. We take care of transport work, as well as data structure work. The data structure work(https://github.com/cosmic-api/teleport.py) is similar to Thrift, Protobuf, Avro, etc but with more emphasis on 'information on web' rather than dealing with raw bytes.
Cosmic is trying to achieve similar goal as Docker, as we are trying to build a framework/tools/services which solves APIs X languages matrix(Slide 14 of http://www.slideshare.net/dotCloud/why-docker).
FYI, the project is still in very early design stage, any feedback is very appreciated.
Congratz! I've been using 0MQ for few years on distributed db, now it's hard not to architect distributed/threaded apps without 'message passing' design which 0mq is pushing for. Plus the mailing list is pretty helpful and friendly.
Also, this is where the technical dept incurs over time, if the abstraction/duplication is held off.