Another, less extreme version: "Your most important collaborator is yourself six months ago, and they won't respond to your emails."

I just spat coffee all over my desk. This is hilarious yet depressing since it reminds me that perhaps the human mind is like the ship of Theseus.

I don't know about my whole brain, but my programming brain totally is.

Now that I've been programming for a nontrivial number of years, it's happened enough that I no longer trust future me to understand anything clever that I do, so I spend much more time structuring code to require minimal context. Failing that, ample documentation, because future me will appreciate having an essay to read much more than current me wants to write it.

This is depressingly familiar. I can't tell you the number of times I've got an error, searched, ended up on StackOverflow reading the answer, full of stuff I have no knowledge of. Get to the end, it was answered by me. More than twice.

Seriously.

I'm now more obsessed with documentation and the kind of code structuring you mention and have come to hate, viscerally, projects that lack documentation.

As a potential aside, I once took a course in ASP. We had a bit of time before the class started and the tutor had a chat with a couple of us. Some huge government projects were in the news for having failed and gone well over budget. He told me he'd worked for the company behind them and that they used to obfuscate the code just by stripping out all the comments so the government had to keep going back to them for work.

I think of that any time I hear "but the code is the documentation"…

Or perhaps created anew every morning.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

This is great! Thank you food sharing this!

Last week I found a bug where if I could go back in time 6 months, I'd go back and slap myself silly.

The version I've evolved, for teaching students why I care about style:

You need to communicate clearly with a number of coworkers, the most important of whom is future-nerdponx. Sometimes future-nerdponx is smarter than you, and sometimes future-nerdponx is dumber than you, but either way they know where you live, and their misery is your misery.

Sometimes I write my future self emails (well, logs), especially when I'm carefully stepping through knowledge domains or decisions I don't understand.

It's so helpful when I do it that I probably ought to do it more, and if there weren't so much overhead I'd probably do it everywhere.

Just watched Tenet yesterday and this comment reminded me of the pincer technique