The "It’s harder to read code than to write it" was always silly. The example spolsky gives to support it is basically "devs like to rewrite other devs code, therefore reading is hard" which is obviously bunch of nonsense. That's like saying reading poetry is harder than writing poetry because poets keep writing new poems despite the fact that Shakespeare already wrote it. Now that you can recruit LLM to explain any complicated codebase to you it's even less true.

This isn't a great analogy. The thing about code is it is part of a whole. While often code can be read in smaller pieces and understood, quite often you have to understand a very large part, if not all the work to really see what is going on.

This is why things like SAST are topical. They miss all kinds of exploits because they don't understand the program. The more in depth you try to scan the more the memory requirements explode.

Now LLMs are much better at this, but between context windows and costs you can bankrupt yourself pretty quick putting code bases in context memory.