[Zababa]

To continue on what you said, some people are going to be 10x programmers on a specific codebase, and go back to average programmer when they start a new job. Some will become a 10x in a year, some will still be average after 5 years.

One thing that I've observed is that productive programmers seem to more often "just do things". For example, when impelmenting a feature, instead of thinking about the feature and a potential refactor at the same time, experimenting a bit about how it could look, they'll just implement the feature, so they are done with their task, and then see from here if the refactor is needed.