When I'm feeling all Dread Pirate Roberts about some software, I sometimes reinvent it myself. Occasionally well, often badly. I tend to learn things, though.

A particular thing I often learn is that whomever came up with the software did a lot of thinking. And they made their best effort.

And if / when I reinvent my own version for the same problem set, I bang my head into a bunch of things. And then I realize that what I thought was weird in the other software turned out that way for fully understandable reasons. Often good reasons.

Practically never because, say, I'm smarter than the person who wrote that other software and have noticed something they didn't.

So, I often ask myself "how else would you have done it?" Like, how else in the universe might this thing have come together?

Maybe, rarely, occasionally do I have an actually good idea.