At the end the article tries to tie this to the importance of looking at code: > He wrote about a peculiar observation: everyone says reading code is important

At the end the article tries to tie this to the importance of looking at code: > He wrote about a peculiar observation: everyone says reading code is important, yet few of us actually do it. This is an approximation of watching screencasts, just like watching games on Lichess is an approximation of watching chess on Twitch or YouTube. While it’s a nice supplement to reading code, it is a tiny fraction of my code consumption. That “code is not literature” is just the non linear nature of reading code*, but still perusing the source code, documentation, commits, tests, data, etc is far more important way of consuming code than watching it being typed out. Talks are important but most of the utility is the author deliberately communicating something. As for reading code in a way that reflects it being different from literature, it’s helpful to be able to quickly search the code and find references whether through searching or links. Running the tests or using the code in a repl or by making a program that uses it is also important and reflects the naturalist aspect mentioned in the article. This seems like it could be quite cool but I think to help programmers to understand more codebases it would be better to try to streamline reading code in a non-linear way. Take reading the repo of LLVM for example. I think an LLM could be handy here. I could ask it to categorize the files. * Reading literature is also not fully linear, especially after the first read.