I remember reading a much older article posted here. The author recounted his time working with two different coders, and how he admired and respected each of t

I remember reading a much older article posted here. The author recounted his time working with two different coders, and how he admired and respected each of them. One was very skilled at reading code. That skill didn't just help him with being able to understand easy to read code, but also to understand difficult to read code. This allowed him to go through the tech stack to find out what is wrong. The other was very skilled at writing readable code, and more importantly, structuring its abstractions and interfaces just right. The primitives provided were exactly what he needed. Sometimes, when he wanted to expand the functionality, he finds out there were already primitives he can use for that expanded functionality. It's not like you can't do both, but they are distinct skills and useful in different ways.