> The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.

As one of those developers who has written almost no significant code by hand since November 2025, but has produced a great deal of working software, I still understand the majority of the code I've produced just as well as if I'd typed it myself.

I may not be typing it myself, but I'm manipulating it constantly. It's not as simple as "reading" it - I'm reading it, executing it, figuring out refactorings for it, having tests built for it, having documentation built for it, sometimes writing that documentation myself, spinning up example scripts that use it, then building new code that depends on that previous code.

It's that act of exercising the code that gives me confidence that I understand it.