Comment by dns_snek
1 day ago
> reading code is a much more difficult
Not inherently, no. Reading it and getting a cursory understanding is easy, truly understanding what it does well, what it does poorly, what the unintended side effects might be, that's the difficult part.
In real life I've witnessed quite a few intelligent and experienced people who truly believe that they're thinking "really hard" and putting out work that's just as good as their previous, pre-AI work, and they're just not. In my experience it roughly correlates to how much time they think they're saving, those who think they're saving the most time are in fact cutting corners and putting out the sloppiest quality work.
It depends on the language, paradigm (or lack thereof), quality/accuracy of the names.
My work’s codebase is 30 years of never-refactored C++. It takes an exceptional amount of focus and thinking to get even a cursory understanding of anything a particular method or class does or why it’s there.
But for languages like C, I agree with you (as long as function pointers aren’t used abused).