> The single most valuable shift I made was treating every feature as a thinking problem first and an implementation problem second

That’s pretty much the whole point of software engineering. Coding is easy, solving problems is hard and can be messy (communication errors and workarounds to some inevitable issue).

If you’re familiar with the codebase, when you have a change request, you will probably get an insight on how to implement it. The hard thing is not to code it, but to recalibrate all the tradeoffs so that you don’t mess with existing features. That’s why SWE principles exists. To make this hard thing easier to do.