Ha, this is basically me. I've written a few (small) apps/tools over the course of my career, but every time they have been extreme focus events where I had to re-learn the language from the ground up. I remember concepts (e.g. I know I need a for loop here), but not the exact syntax of how to write them, for example. I cannot force myself to do this - I have to have a direct immediate interest in getting that specific tool done and it typically happens on accident.

Ops I think can be great for this personality type. But it really depends on the exact ops job, and the person in question. Some ops jobs are more flexible than others, and I think flexibility is really what matters the most. I was an extremely productive sysadmin when I did that as my dayjob, but if you asked me to show up during any block of 8 contiguous hours we were going to have a bad time. If I could randomly show up at 3am to hack out that task I just remembered it was a great fit, since you'd get far more work out of me overall.

Tooling helped a bit.

Debuggers or things like Sentry and Honeycomb. Basically everything that gives me runtime insights to the software.

Using static types and tests to ensure every dumb change I make gets caught somewhere.