Comment by simonw
6 days ago
For the first 15 years of my career I found reading code much harder than writing code. Then I invested a lot of effort in improving my code reading and code reviewing skills, with the result that code reading no longer intimidates me like it used to.
That's why I think reading is harder than writing: it takes a whole lot more effort to learn code reading skills, in my experience.
Thanks, now I understand your perspective.
It seems like your answer to sarchertech's upthread "if you put in equal amounts of practice at reading and writing code you'll get faster at reading code than writing code" question might be "yes". Either that or you've intentionally invested more in your reading skills than your writing skills.
I'm not sure if "equal practice" is exactly right, but my opinion is that code reading and code review are skills that you can deliberately strengthen - and strengthening can help you get a lot more value out of both LLMs and collaborative development.
Oh course reading code is a skill that can be strengthened. Just like writing code can.
But if reading code is indeed harder than writing code, it stands to reason that if you put in equal effort to improving reading and writing abilities, your writing abilities would improve comparatively more.
If you spent all this time and effort learning to read code, such that you can read code 6x faster than you can write it, how do you know that you couldn’t have spent that effort improving you’re writing abilities such that you could write code 6x faster.
On the other hand if you did spend the same effort deliberately trying to increase you’re writing abilities as you did reading and the result is that you can read 6x faster than you can write, I’m unsure how you can support the conclusion that reading code is harder than writing it.
My gut feeling is that people on the far pro AI side of the spectrum tend to be people who are early in their career who don’t have strong writing or reading abilities (and so don’t really see the flaws) or people who have a reached a level where they aren’t really ICs anymore (even if that is their title). The latter have better reading than writing abilities because that’s what they spend all day doing.
Not that reading code is something that has an inherently higher skillcap than writing it.
I think there’s also a 3rd type of heavy AI proponent—people who spent most of their time cranking out MVPs or one offs that don’t require heavy maintenance (or they aren’t the ones doing the maintenance).
That’s not to say that I don’t think AI isn’t useful in those cases. I use AI pretty often myself when I’m writing in a language I don’t use everyday. Or when I’m doing something that I know has existing algorithmic solutions that I can’t quite remember (but I’ll know it when I see it) because it’s faster than googling. But I also recognize that there are many styles of programming, people, and domains where the productivity gains aren’t worth it.
2 replies →