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I forget I even wrote the stuff. Someone will ask me a question and tell me I wrote it, and I don’t believe them. Even after I check the commit history and see I did in fact write it, I have no memory of it. I’m slightly bothered by how often this happens.

I stated programming games on a school computer in the early to mid 80’s. When the tape drive broke, I still used to have the code in my head, just type it all in for others to play. Now I find code I wrote last month and can’t remember doing it. At least it tends to be, “which genius wrote this” these day. Tend to leave comments everywhere for myself now, including my own name and other messages to myself like,“don’t touch this it works, your bug will be in…”

Yeah, I’m about the same age and started noticing my ability to keep everything in memory falling at around the mid 20s. I mean, I’m still probably way better at keeping all manner of obscure details in memory compared to the average person (we exercise that so much in this profession it’s only normal), but it’s below the peak point, not enormously so but it’s kind like having been a top “athlete” years later you know you can’t reach that peak performance anymore.

Also once you go through the full life-cycle of enough of your projects and you get to pick it up again a year or two later, you kinda figure out that even at peak “performance” you wouldn’t be remembering much from a project from years ago.

Fortunally I figured it out long ago that I’ve created a couple of principles around commenting that have repeatedly saved my ass years later: things like documention parameter assumptions in functions, actually writting down the “why we do this” or commenting before the code of especially complex algorithms (I actually design the algorithm to the comment first and only after than code it).

Yes, very similar practices here.