Not all programmers are intuitives; there are a great many who are sensors who lack a mental model of how their device operates or how the software they're interfacing with at a DSL or API level operates.
They have a mental map of commands and structures for everything they make, and make "new" things by following examples of new maps. Ie, copying code from SO.
I don't think programming by rote is actually possible past a relatively low threshold. Code is relatively delicate, so just "add strings to files; invoke" is not going to work for most strings.
I wonder if "sensors" tend to work more in legacy code. no matter what I need to do at work, something similar probably exists already in the code somewhere. first step is almost always to find that similar code, copy-paste, and tweak it until it works. if you try to get too creative, you get bitten by some weird edge case that would have been handled if you just followed the pattern.
They have a mental map of commands and structures for everything they make, and make "new" things by following examples of new maps. Ie, copying code from SO.