Comment by foster_nyman

This feels like a learning-theory restatement of the Kernighan quote: the point isn’t “never be clever”, it’s that cleverness is trainable. If you write right at your current ceiling, you reliably create a debugging task that’s a bit above it, and that mismatch becomes the stimulus (and motivation) for skill growth. I think the same lever shows up in writing: drafting is “coding”, editing is “debugging”. If I only write safe/obvious prose, revision stays in the flow zone but I plateau. If I try a structure/argument I can’t quite see the full shape of yet, the rewrite phase hurts, but it’s literally me moving through the next rung. All of which maps pretty cleanly to Vygotsky’s ZPD (the bug report / reader confusion is the scaffold), and it’s also an antidote to Dunning–Kruger: the work keeps falsifying your self-assessment. The “wow, I was wrong” moment is often just evidence your skill bar moved.

Caveat: in collaborative/prod contexts you sometimes trade cleverness for maintainability, but if you always do that, you skip the lever.