Along these same lines, I have been trying to become better at knowing when my work could benefit from reversion to the "boring" and general mean and when outsourcing thought or planning would cause a reversion to the mean (downwards).

This echos the comments here about enjoying not writing boilerplate. The there is that our minds are programmed to offload work when we can and redirecting all the saved boilerplate to going even deeper on parts of the problem that benefit from original hard thinking is rare. It is much easier to get sucked into creating more boilerplate, and all the gamification of Claude code and incentives of service providers increase this.