[makeitdouble]

Sounds me like what you see in the Amanda type is "balance", landing as Mort mixed with an Einstein.

To quote OP: "None of these personas represent a real engineer - every engineer is a mix, and a human with complex motivations and perspectives"

[Spivak]

The problem is that "work smart not hard" for software devs is counterintuitive because using your brain is the hard work. Einstein works too hard and creates code that's hard to reason about, Most doesn't work hard enough and creates code that's hard to reason about.

The originating example for an Amanda is someone who used her brain to recognize that the existing code was clumsily modeling a state machine and clarified the code by reframing it in terms of well-known vocabulary. It's technically an abstraction but because every dev is taught in advance how they work it's see-through and reduces cognitive load even when you must peel back the abstraction to make changes.