[hrabago]

> When I go back and look at code I did in the past, without having looked at it awhile, I see that it is really quite brilliant.

We have the opposite experience. Whenever I see code I wrote in a past life, I see ugly code. I certainly would have written it differently if my future self wrote it. I see it as a reflection of how much I've learned since writing that old code.

I tell a lot of people: Code I wrote yesterday is great; code I wrote a year ago sucks.

Unless, of course, I do as the OP does and look at other people's code. Then even the code I'm writing now would not be good enough.