There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you’ve been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you’ve done all you can there, and it’s time for someone else to work at that level. The new person, Smith, is a maintainer, develops in small increments, fixes bugs and most important takes feature requests from the other developer, Jones, who is now creating Level N + 1. Jones is a good person to do this because they know everything about the capabilities of the lower level. But now they’re going to pretend they’ve forgotten all that, and is looking at a whole new machine, created out of the new capabilities of Level N. That’s how you build any complex layered piece of software. And because this is the method used in boostraps, you can build level N+1 using tools written in N. #