That&#x27;s not really true, is it? Coupling is independent from explicit code dependencies. Take, for instance, two programs. One writes to &quot;&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;file&quot;. The other reads from &quot;&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;file&quot; but neither shares the code to determine the path (&quot;&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;file&quot;, in this case). They&#x27;re code independent, but very tightly coupled.<p>In fact, I&#x27;d hypothesise that copy-paste codebases are more tightly coupled than otherwise.