> I genuinely wonder how the above can be accomplished without reading any code.

We can't see the code for the laws of physics, and yet experiment by experiment we've come a long way.

That's not usually going to be the most efficient way to understand code, but I've found that it's pretty useful to be one of the few empiricists in an organization full of rationalists (software engineers are typically rationalists in my experience). I wouldn't propose that we dispense with rationalism altogether, but it does seem that the we'll benefit by achieving a better balance than we've traditionally had.

> We can't see the code for the laws of physics, and yet experiment by experiment we've come a long way.

Interesting perspective. Haven't really thought through that lens