Comment by josephg

Yeah; this is such a hard intuition to teach beginners. And something I think will be lost as we move more and more toward vibe coding.

There is so much to be learned about a problem - and programming in general - by implementing stuff and then refactoring it into the ground. Most of the time the abstractions I think up at first are totally wrong. Like, I imagine my program will model categories A, B and C. But when I program it up, the code for B and C is kinda similar. So I combine them, and realise C is just a subset of B. And sometimes then I realise A is a distinct subset of B as well, and I rewrite everything. Or sometimes I realise B and C differ in one dimension, and A and B in another. And that implies there's a fourth kind of thing with both properties.

Do this enough and your code ends up in an entirely unrecognisable place from where you started. But very, very beautiful.