I find my personal memory is very ephemeral, without repetition, things get quickly forgotten. In a long enough timeline, about 1-3 year, I start to fail recognizing my own code. Since I have trained most Jr Devs I work with they all have similar coding patterns as me, which makes it even harder.
Granted, I have specific code tells, which helps, but like the article mentions I have forgotten the why or the bug that I fixed that required specific changes.
That feeling when you go on a rant about how something was done in a super confusing way, so you do a ‘git blame’ or equivalent - and it’s all your fault. Oops.
This is why there's a "from:" line in the standard commit message template I introduced for my group of teams. If there's a ticket, bug report, user story, specification change, or standards reason for the commit I want to know that later. Sometimes that makes it into the code comments, and sometimes into the docs. It's always in the commit.
Granted, I have specific code tells, which helps, but like the article mentions I have forgotten the why or the bug that I fixed that required specific changes.