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.

This analogy directly addresses spolsky’s botched argument. The point is devs went into this career to dev not read other people’s code whether it makes business sense or not. What you said applies to writing code just as well as reading it so clearly writing cant be easier than reading - it’s at least as hard and most definitely harder