In the Age of AI, is Code Literacy Your Superpower?

ChatGPT can give you code, but can your brain process it?

nuanced take on ML tools returning bad solution

source: https://xkcd.com/1838

I thought about that question on my way back from JSCraftCamp (June 27, 2025) ¹. It was something that I extracted from Daniel Lamire post on X:

The skill you need to develop early on is reading code and instantly understanding it. If you’re a programmer, you might forget you have this skill. ChatGPT can give you code, but can your brain process it? If you give Donald Trump ChatGPT, he still won’t code your web app. He’ll get code but won’t understand it. - source X

I reflected on how I used GitHub Copilot in the past week and it became apparent that I read all the code that it generated. I did this because I want to be sure it’s not sneaking in accidental bug or performance defect. Perhaps this is also a behaviour I have besides using AI, which is — reading/reviewing the code before committing a big change.

AI Wrote Your Code, Who’s Responsible When It Fails?

You should be responsible for the code you ship.

This probably goes against the ethics of modern vibe coding — Focus on the problem, not the code. Code is just the medium, what matters is solving the right problems ².

I disagree. What matters is “solving the right problems, with good code”. Your future self will thank you for that. If you decide to continue with vibe coding by re-rolling over debugging, have fun with it.

an Ode to good code

source: https://xkcd.com/1695

A question to ask yourself after shipping a vibe coded app — Is your code a ticking time bomb?

AI Writes the Code, The Best Engineers Read It

Going back to my initial question, I believe it’s an essential skill to read code and understand it. More than half of our coding time is spent reading code. Multiple empirical studies using surveys, observational data, eye tracking, and large-scale field data consistently indicate that developers spend between 58% and 70% of their time reading and understanding code ³ ⁴ ⁵.

You read code before adding new ones, you read code to fix defects. This makes code comprehension/literacy an essential skill. It was important in the past, and still is important even with Generative AI.

I’ll end with this — AI Writes the Code. Real Engineers Read, then Edit or Delete it.

In the Age of AI, is Code Literacy Your Superpower?

AI Wrote Your Code, Who’s Responsible When It Fails?

AI Writes the Code, The Best Engineers Read It

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