It's a mix of puzzle solving, optimizing, tool building, skill building, and just getting comfortable with the tools.

There's quite an ego boost in actually solving problems for people. Being the one who is the hacker of last resort, etc.

Many of the finer points are like being able to fix a Cesium Beam Atomic clock... not very useful in real life, but lots of bragging points, none the less.

Everyone says that if you write the most difficult program you're smart enough to write, you won't be smart enough to debug it, so I'm wondering what would happen if I tried. Would some finite piece of code keep surprising me for the rest of my life despite being an artifact of my own mind?

The thing about it is to avoid being clever. If you pack so much logic in so few characters that your program looks like line noise, you'll have to unpack it every time you see it. Most people can only keep about 5-9 things in their head at a given time... you'll run out of stack.

If you break it down into parts that are easier to reason about, and thus debug. You can build anything without hitting that limit. Any Thing

Yes, you can be omni potent! What's not to love about that?

How we expand the art of "describing behaviors to our machines" from < 1% of the world ( who can program ) to the other 99%...

I like to see my ideas come to life, and to know them inside and out.