The hyperfocus I experience while mildly stoned leads to some incredible breakthroughs, and many happy hours of progress. I find it allows me to keep a much larger amount of state in my mind at any given time, and makes my state memory more resilient to distractions like Facebook notifications and emails. It also dramatically improves my patience (a quality I normally lack), so I can hack away at a difficult problem for hours at a time.

Many of my favorite personal projects come from (or at least start during) a marijuana session.

I don't see it as an enhancement but rather a tradeoff. It's harder to focus on specific ideas when stoned but easier to build relations between ideas, both are equally important. I also find I easily diverge in depth on every concern of the problem at hand, which may or may not be useful depending on the time frame.

Being stoned is a state of mind halfway between dreaming where you subconsciously imagine everything and being awake where you consciously see everything. If you play music you already know this as being in "the zone". Over time you get a feel for this state of mind and can easily get back there without smoking.

I suspect people who feel anxious when high are those trying to control everything as if they were fully awake. The big paradigm shift comes when you learn to give up control of your own thoughts to your subconscious. Just like the musicians who try to control everything about how they play and end up thinking about what others might think instead of imagining the sounds they should be playing in the first place.

Weed can most definitely help with your work by changing your perspective over it and thus exposing new relations between ideas. But in doing so you will also get a new perspective on yourself. This in turn expose the mental barriers currently blocking your creativity and there lies the paradigm shift. Being creative is something we all do from birth but lose as we grow up depending on our life experiences. Being high is a ticket for introspection where you revisit what caused the barriers to exist in the first place, accept it and then move on to be freely creative.

You might also want to check out Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner. He talks in depth about the psychology of our own mental barriers and how to overcome them.

If you think of weed as a magic thought enhancer, it's not. It's a magic introspection device and the results of that introspection is enhanced creativity.

A friend told me - If you've abstained for a while and then smoke, yes it helps creativity / thinking. A lot. If you consume daily then not at all

One area where it's really interesting is increasing spacial understanding. For example, 3D programming concepts.

I have absolutely noticed it helping me understand concepts in 3D programming. I would say it helps me understand mathematical concepts in general.

Its enhancements are amplified by the context in which it's used. If you are a frequent user and tend to use it when trying to relax, that will be the mode your body associates THC intake with.

It can give you a different perspective on your product since it will appear "new" to you (cannabis makes life seem more novel). And it makes you appreciate good UI/UX.

strongly advocate.