Comment by simonw
6 days ago
I think Joel is a professional, and that's why he says "reading code is harder than writing code".
You seem to be misunderstanding me. I'm not saying "anyone who thinks reading code is harder than writing code is an amateur". I'm saying "reading code IS harder than writing code, which is why being good at reading code is what separates experienced programmers from beginners."
Ok so you disagree with the person that kicked this off with
“Reading code is vastly quicker than writing it from scratch”
Only if you're not very good at reading code. If you've invested a lot of effort in improving your code reading and code review skills you can work a lot more productively with LLMs than people who don't have good code reading skills.
So you think that reading code is harder, but if you put in equal amounts of practice at reading and writing code you’ll get faster at reading code than writing code?
Sounds to me like you don’t think reading code is harder.
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