> Now, tell him to add those numbers in his head. He can look at the screen and talk/whisper/mutter to himself, but he can’t write anything down and he can’t ty

> Now, tell him to add those numbers in his head. He can look at the screen and talk/whisper/mutter to himself, but he can’t write anything down and he can’t type anything. "Why can't I write anything down?" "Because when I'm seven to ten levels deep in a stack of issues, I never write anything down, I need to keep it all in my head." "But why?" "Well... I have a whole mental model constructed. I couldn't possibly write it all down." "But it seriously wouldn't help you to keep some notes while you work? And perhaps add to the skimpy comments in the codebase while you're doing it?" "I seriously don't see how that would help." "You literally just said you've written down the code '8xZ204330Kd' and now you have no idea what it was for. Did you imagine you'd be guaranteed to remember it between writing it down and finally solving the bug? Why didn't you at least write some context about what that string was?" Seriously, just like most kids somewhere between the ages of four and ten goes from "I know I will remember this!" to "I should write this down so I don't forget," programmers could stand to recognize that sometimes taking some notes can help clear their brain when they're too many levels deep in a stack.