Understanding and managing complexity is one of the first steps required in order to eliminate complexity. Some of the greatest achievements in my software development career have been instances where I carefully pulled apart inscruitable solutions, often short-term and built in desperation, and re-constituted them into well tested and much less complex solutions which were more understandable by devs and users.

I agree with most of Chris' observations and enjoyed reading his insights. Makes me want to do the same!

  #include 
  int main() {
     for (int x = 0;;x++) {
        putc(*(char*)x);
     }
     return 0;
   }

Example: Alice is building the front-end for a product search page. Bob is building the product search APIs on the back-end. Alice and Bob working together can share immediate feedback on each other's designs and implementations, and work out any tiny ambiguities that weren't covered by whatever specification they previously agreed on.

I think some of the best software dev experiences in my career have come from this style of collaboration.