What I meant was, there's often talk on HN about how distractions during programming will tear down your "mind palace" and force you to build up your mental mod

What I meant was, there's often talk on HN about how distractions during programming will tear down your "mind palace" and force you to build up your mental model from scratch. There are certainly problems I've dealt with that take more than 20 minutes (or even days) to grok, but almost none where I couldn't talk to someone and then jump right back in unless I'm actively learning/researching/debugging (which is maybe 10% of the time). With most of my work, I only have to deal with local functions and behaviors without having to run the whole stack in my head. Everything else is on paper or in my notes. But it seems that many others don't operate this way, and I'm very curious about this division.