Lucky you. I always go "huh, so I wrote this?". And this was in the pre-AI era.

These feelings aren't mutually exclusive. I'm often like "I have no memory of this place" while my name stares at me from git blame, but that doesn't mean my intuition of how it's structured isn't highly likely to be right in such cases.

Like a painter not remembering a specific stroke, but being able to recreate it instantly because of years of muscle memory.

There is probably a bias here, because you notice the times where the code is unfamiliar more than the times when it’s still familiar. You wouldn’t go “huh” if not remembering was the normal case. If it were, you’d rather go “huh” if exceptionally you do remember.

It feels like that at first, especially as I get older. But I still think it comes back to me a lot quicker if I once understood it than if I was learning it from scratch. Possibly just because I know how I think.

I find this to be the case if it was something I was deeply involved with.

Other times, I can make a small change to something that doesn't require much time, and once it's tested and committed, I quickly lose any memory of even having done it.

Yeah I did pour a lot of sweat and thinking into that codebase all those years ago.

When I do a drive-by edit, I probably don't remember it in a week.

Which is why the "cognitive debt" from the article is relevant, IMHO. If I just thoroughly review the plan and quickly scan the resulting code, will that have a strong enough imprint on my mind over time?

I would like to think "yes", my gut is telling me "no". IMHO the LLMs are now "good enough" for coding. These are hard questions we'll have to grapple with this in the next year or two (in context of AI-assisted software development).

I definitely understand my own code better than what other people wrote, even from 10 years ago. I often see code and think "this makes sense to do it this way". Turns out I wrote it years ago.

That means your personal growth has plateaued. ;)

My coding style definitely has plateaued. It probably even has regressed to preferring simpler code.

But that's not a regression...

And always thinking your code from a year ago is shit means the code you write right now is also shit, so you never get good.

That's the correct attitude.