> Perhaps (though i lean towards disagreement), but that discussion is not with the maintainer or rest of the team. "I thought about it and this is the best approach trust me bro" is not a great push request. All those questions the contributor answered and "discussed" are un-resolved for everyone else, and the burden of proof should be on the contributor.

I'm not sure what I'm missing, but that sounds very similar to the idea that the parent comment says about reflection happening before, during, and after writing the code. It's not at all uncommon for me to explain some code I pushed for review with something like "Originally, I planned to use approach X, but then I ran into complication Y, so I switched to approach Z to handle that". At least to me, this fits the pattern of reflecting beforehand (selecting an initial approach), during (deciding on how to handle a complication during the process of development), and after (literally the explanation itself to describe how the final state was reached), but it doesn't sound anywhere close to "trust me bro".

I don't read the parent comment as arguing against these sorts of explanations, just against the idea that the explanation could be sufficiently written entirely up front before any of the code was written.