I wonder if there are code speed reading courses — the way there are speed reading courses for text. As AI generates more code faster than we can review it, the ability to quickly comprehend unfamiliar code becomes a critical skill.
Some interesting perspectives from the conversation that followed:
- Build tools to read for you — Tudor Girba’s take: the answer isn’t faster reading, it’s building contextual tools that read through code for you. Same way we scaled functionality checks through automated testing, we need to scale comprehension.
- Abstraction as speed reading — Dipan Mehta’s point: when higher-level functions and APIs work as expected, you can skip reading the lines underneath. Good abstraction is speed reading.
- Slower might be better — Willem van den Ende’s counter: deliberate, careful comprehension beats skimming. Emily Bache’s Sparrow Deck videos on reading long methods are worth watching.
The underlying question: in a world where AI writes most of the code, does “reading code” remain a human skill or does it become something we delegate to tools? And if we delegate it, what does that mean for accountability?
Originally posted on LinkedIn