For what it’s worth I don’t think your age thing is accurate. As a counterpoint I started as a teen and still prefer to grow the code mostly organically and trust that a) I can make fairly robust decisions on the fly for durable decisions and the non durable ones don’t need as much thought. Even up front planning will miss design mistakes when review by multiple people.
It might be more relevant how you started programming. If you're playing with things, taking them apart, making them do odd things — it's likely you pick up a bottom-up understanding, messing with minor aspects at first. That lends itself to becoming a "sorcerer". Conversely, if you acquire a skill in pursuit of solving a specific problem (and matching how things are taught, mostly), you start top-down, becoming a "wizard".
Yeah that sounds like a more plausible hypothesis. Although the line is very blurred about how you defined “specific problem”. Everything I started programming with was specific problem I was having at the time (writing a media indexer to dedupe my music library, writing a presence simulator to fool those early “pay you for browsing your computer” adware) rather than just playing around for the sake of playing around. From one respective I was picking problems randomly and seeing if I could solve them so I guess that’s more playing around. But it’s not like playing around with graphics where you try to see what kind of effects you can create.
