Like you, I will sometimes find code I wrote a few months ago and wonder what I was thinking. How could I have ever come up with something so awful?

I think this proves that we learned something during the time we spent not looking at that code. If we didn't do that, we should wonder what we are doing wrong right now.

In a Slashdot interview a while back, David Korn, inventor of the Korn shell, said that he often looks through the code he wrote for the Korn shell about two years ago, wonders what an idiot he was, rips it out, and starts it over again. He's been doing this every few years since he started the project (15-20 years or so).

It at least sets my mind at peace to know that master programmers do this, too :)