Copy and Paste Programming

The practice became a named anti-pattern in software engineering during the 1990s. The term "anti-pattern" was coined in 1995 by Andrew Koenig, inspired by the earlier Design Patterns book by the Gang of Four. The specific "cut-and-paste programming" anti-pattern was formally documented in the 1998 book AntiPatterns by William Brown and colleagues, which catalogued it alongside other common coding pitfalls. Prior to searchable online codebases, the pattern was constrained by the difficulty of finding code to copy; the internet dramatically amplified its prevalence.