I wonder what an equivalent programmer trick might be?

With code, I can usually do it quicker, around 12 hours does the trick for me.

I recently found out that waiting even longer has benefits too. I didn't touch a project for several months, and when I returned to it to decide next steps, I could see a much bigger picture of its state and the goals, and made a number of big decisions in the general direction of the project.

Many times I talk to my friend about what I programmed and what it does (or doesn't because of a bug) just in the sake of telling someone what I did "today" even when my friend has no clue about any sort of programming.

That's sometimes called "rubber ducking", because some people use a rubber duck or a portrait of a famous computer scientist like Donald Knuth of John Carmack to "explain the problem to".

Today, Intellisense suddently stopped working (code completely black, no suggestions), after I left to get some food. I spent 2 hours trying to reset stuff, repull the repo, even installed f*cking Visual-Studio 2017 (already been negatively conditioned towards VS2015 being buggy for me...), but couldn't get it to run.

By accident, I landed on an older branch of the project, and now suddenly everything was working again. I realized that this bug would only affect certain files in the newest commit, but since changing include files only sometimes and inconsitently worked, I pretty much ended up undoing every single file until I finally got some highlighting in the affected files. I found the responsible file, which had numerous changes, so I undid every single unit of change until I found whats responsible:

template<typename AttributeEntry>
struct BaseDeclaration
{
    using EntryVector = std::vector<AttributeEntry>;

    BaseDeclaration(std::wstring strName, EntryVector vEntries) :
        m_strName(std::move(strName)), m_vEntries(std::move(vEntries))
    {
    }

    template<typename OtherEntry>
    BaseDeclaration(std::wstring strName, std::vector<OtherEntry> vOtherEntries) :
        m_strName(std::move(strName))
    {
        // ... doesn't matter
    }

    // ...
};

The addition of the second constructor fucked up intellisense, but only outside of this file (inside the file, everything worked fine) and without any kind of warning/error. Removing it fixed everything. Sigh. I'm still trying to figure out whats the exact problem (probably ambiguity?) and how to circumvent it, but I just needed to let out some fruststration about a totally wasted evening...