Don't need to be smart to be a decent programmer.
Folks capture the state of the world inside their head, and then commit it to a mental stack. They move up and down the stack to recall the world as it was a day ago or a minute ago. Smarter people have larger stacks.
If you have an average sized stack like me (roughly three, blown by switching browser tabs), augment your memory by writing things down. It's much slower but it produces the same result.
One of the dumbest fucken things is Slack and Discord "replies" that start a subthread in a conversation. Great, now it's reddit and I have to go fucken expand all that misery, good work.