I think the first part is confusing in saying that "[good programmers] have a model of exactly what the computer does when it executes each statement." That makes me think of machine language: absolutely no abstraction. Good programmers don't need to understand every little detail of what's going on when a computer runs a program; it helps sometimes, but it's not fundamental. Anyway, from the article we can't say if that's what Reges meant.

The idea of a generative model reminds of the Architect, one of the INTP types, blokes the seek to model everything and understand every little detail of how stuff works. I expect a lot of hackers to be of this type.