- in a domain that they understand
- if given suitable tools
I've seen musicians do things I couldn't begin to draft an implementation of, thanks to domain-specific environments like Max/MSP. Their understanding of audio mixing, musical timing, and signal processing mapped to the development environment _and_ workflow intuitively.
It's humbling when you struggle through basic DSP, then a guitarist shows you a complex algorithm and shrugs it of with "its just like lil effects boxes, dude."
Watching him debug was eye opening too. As if tracing a buzz on his guitar's signal path, he patched in after each node to confirm the output at each step, like I'd do with a debugger on each line of my code.
His context was so beyond my understanding though, picking up on issues further down the signal chain by noticing frequencies that would feedback, clip or cause phase issues. It really showed me that an understanding of the domain and context of what you're trying to achieve trumps nearly everything else.