Fun experiment about ownership bias

TL;DR: I made it = I think it is a better product (than if I did not make it).

Funny part: It was (made artificially) hard = I think it is a better product (than if it were easy), even though the product is objectively worse due to artificial hardness.

Relevance to programming:

I might write some convoluted code that was hard to write, thinking it is great code.

But in reality, simpler code could be better (and it can be tricky to see that through the ownership bias).

Learning / improving can involve grieving over the death of a part of our (past) self (who wrote that objectively inferior code).

(On a philosophical level, when something changes, portions of the past version literally cease to exist, and when it concerns something personal, it feels like a kind of death.)