I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code.

I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should.

I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file.

It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.