I try to explain what I mean the next few sentences of the post. I have spent a good amount of my career jumping into fairly large code bases. I don't need to take it quite so step by step. I have seen enough code to take shortcuts, to guess at what is there.

But telling people that isn't helpful. I try at the beginning to give more step by step of how I would get into understand the code base if I didn't already know these kinds of shortcuts. (I'm not sure I could write those down, they are just know how and heuristics, like how when you are a starting to code a missing ; can take a much longer time to see than as you've been programming for a while)