[darkerside]

It can also work the opposite way. You can think you understand the requirements and go hole yourself away for a couple of days pumping out code. When you finally merge your work, another developer tells you, "Why didn't you just use function X or package Y?".

If you're doing your work in small, sharp bursts, you actually end up with more time in between work for talking with other devs, reading up on technology, etc.

[Bartweiss]

I think this is the better insight.

A lot of DailyWTF posts are about people not knowing a function existed and then reimplementing it horribly. Many of them include a note like "the other 10,000 lines were similar".

Ignorance is not embarrassing, it's the default state when all of our tools grow and change daily. But a lot of the worst wtf moments are clearly cases where something wasn't sanity checked by anyone until it was presented as a finished product - sometimes too late to keep out of production. That's the benefit of frequent commits, reviews, and research breaks; they might not prevent our ignorance, but they keep it under control.