[dack]

It seems like a common intuition in software is the "code smell", where you can just look at some code and tell if it will be "maintainable" or "good", for some value of that.

I've come to think of it more as a "familiarity" though - where if you're familiar with writing stable and maintainable systems, you'll get the right smells - but some people have opposite feelings about systems, and it seems like they are people that have the opposite type of experience as well.

Other types of intuition I think are based mostly on pattern recognition. If you have a system that makes a set of choices that follows a well known pattern to you, your brain can start predicting what has been done where, and with enough confirmation, can start feeling confident about the behavior of other parts not yet scrutinized. Once again, if things are done in an unfamiliar way, all that evaporates and one needs to fall back to looking at the low level strategies and techniques.