Excellent! ++!

When I wrote the chunk you quoted at the top of your post, I knew there was an answer like this one but wasn't sure of what it was. Indeed, I was rather sad, because I figured that nobody would figure it out and I would never know. The idea that writing ordinary code tunnels your vision is something that will stick with me. It's something that I've noticed before in other guises - after all, it happens to me all the time when working on actual projects - and never generalized.

In particular, I see it in retrospect when attempting to extend previous work. Having written some code X that accomplishes a task Y, I look back on it and think "Hmm, this should be extended to perform Y+", where Y+ is some related but additional task. When writing X I was following a misguided version of the YAGNI principle and had left that question for later. Interestingly, this holds even if X is the most logical way to accomplish Y alone. If I had considered this all from the beginning, I may have instead written Z, which is the most logical way to accomplish Y only when considering that we may also have to do Y+ (or other related tasks) as well.