I think to a certain degree it’s just an innate capacity for creativity coupled with logic that gets refined in practice. If you don’t have those core components in you you are pretty much at a disadvantage to develop them.

To be honest in the last 10-15 years with the shift to Agile it really feels like the type of folks who become software devs prior to that shift represent about 15-20% of the new devs now. The rest are kind of just commodity devs. Give them good detailed requirements and they can churn out code. That 15-20% are the ones who can churn out something without a hyper level of detail or refined requirements.