Even worse, in some cases it may be decreasing the writing time and increasing the reading time without reducing the total work.

But the reason we read code is to be able to change it or extend it. If we don’t need to change it extend it, the need to read it disappears too.

No one is hiring though for reading code. I have read 10 million lines of code, roughly, I have written not one line.

Now I have produced a lot of programs, just by reading them.

People should also learn how to read programs. Most open source code is atrocious, corporate code is usually even worse, but not always.

As Donald Knuth once said, code is meant to be read. The time of literate programming is gonna come at some point, either in 100 years or in 3 years.

That ratio no longer holds if people don't look at the code, they just feed it back into a new llm.

People used to resist reading machine generated output. Look at the code generator / source code / compiler, not at the machine code / tables / xml it produces.

That resistance hasn't gone anywhere. Noone wants to read 20k lines of generated C++ nonsense that gcc begrudgingly accepted, so they won't read it. Excitingly the code generator is no longer deterministic, and the 'source code prompt' isn't written down, so really what we've got is rapidly increasing piles of ascii-encoded-binaries accumulating in source control. Until we give up on git anyway.

It's a decently exciting time to be in software.