I loved hakunin’s take in the sibling comment — it touches on a profoundly important insight that has informed all music and software I’ve written since I was a young EDM producer / guitarist.

I was thinking of something else in my original comment however; teaching someone to make music is easy, but teaching them to make _great_ music is almost impossible, because the bottleneck to quality art is always one’s “taste” — or “ear” as it’s often referred to by musicians. I think this concept is synonymous with “talent”, a somewhat mysterious phenomenon.

These ideas seem to run parallel to those explored in this thread related to programmers with and without “taste” as it pertains to the quality of one’s code.

Not the commenter, but also had experience with making music and writing software. I think the same applies to any creative endeavor. It’s super hard to consume what you produce as “someone else” (I.e. read what you write, listen to what you compose with fresh perspective). Usually it takes time to forget and disassociate from your work, because you get too used to it while producing it. Coming back to it another day can work sometimes, but very quickly you’ll get used to it again. I think this is one of the most effective ways to achieve quality tasteful results in anything. If you can train yourself to read your own code with fresh eyes almost as soon as you write it, you’d be unlocking a powerful shortcut, a cheat code to life. It’ll make the biggest impact on your code’s (and any other creative work’s) quality. This is also why sometimes you can spend hours painstakingly trying to design something, and it comes out terrible, nobody likes it. And you can do something in 20 minutes just improvising your way through, and it comes out an elegant masterpiece. That’s because you never gave yourself time to “get used to” your work such that you couldn’t perceive the problems with it anymore. You maintained that fresh impatient perspective the entire time.