It hits home even if you haven't. I'd say that I've felt the same tingle when writing code as well. At times when someone asks for a new feature or I'm working on a particular solution to the problem, I'd definitely get the same feeling that this particular abstractions isn't going to cut it, or that this part of the codebase is going to become unwieldy soon.

I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).