"When the task at hand is much more rigid, with specific guidelines about what tools to use and how to implement things, the ability of a 10x programmer to perform a lot of work in less time is weakened: it can still exploit “local” design possibilities to do a much better work, but cannot change in more profound ways the path used to reach the goal, that may include, possibly, even eliminating part of the specification completely from the project, so that the goal to be reached looks almost the same but the efforts to reach it are reduced by a big factor."

This is one of the reason working in software sucks so badly these days. You'll inevitably be forced to work with lesser tools in more ceremonial ways, which takes away most of the leverage from experience and skill; effectively dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator where everything is done according to some stupid, over engineered specification.

And one of the beefs people seem to have when I share my code publicly. Cutting corners and side-stepping complexity is where coding turns to art for me, where the fun begins; which means that many of my programs look like toys in comparison to "serious" software. Yet they still manage to get the job done for less effort, and a closer look reveals that the simplicity is carefully engineered. I just don't have much time or patience for ceremonies these days.