Programming ruining my memory?

One of the things with programming is that you usually need to interact with way more functions, libraries, and concepts than you can retain or burn into your memory. Your own code almost always falls into this category because you only hung out with the implementation while doing it and so it is not usually part of your embedded knowledge.

I have learned that "clever" code is almost never good long term unless you can implement it behind an interface and the underlying implementation rarely needs to be revisited. Otherwise, you're almost always better off writing transparent code with transparent naming conventions and functions structure whose purpose and behavour and layout are easy to "reoccupy" at a glance.