I once spent three days debugging a production issue only to discover that the bug was in code I had written six months earlier. Not because I was careless or incompetent. Because I literally could not remember what I was thinking when I wrote it. The code worked, which meant nobody questioned it at the time. But working and understood are two very different things, and my code lived comfortably in that gap.

This happens to everyone. We write code that passes every test, ships on time, and then six months later we cannot explain why it does what it does without spending an hour tracing through logic paths we once knew cold. The industry treats this as a natural consequence of moving fast. I think it is a symptom of something deeper: we are terrible at reading other people’s code because we never learned to read our own first.

Software engineering education is almost entirely about writing. You learn syntax, data structures, algorithms, design patterns. Every assignment asks you to produce output from scratch. No professor has ever sat you down with a thousand lines of production code and asked you to explain what it does before touching a single key. So we enter the workforce knowing how to build things but not how to understand things that already exist.

The engineers I have seen ship the most reliable software do something different. Before they write a single line, they read. They trace through existing code paths to understand the shape of the problem space. They look for patterns in how similar features were implemented. They ask questions about edge cases before designing solutions. This takes time, and it feels slow when you are used to opening a blank file and typing your way toward an answer. But the time they save on debugging, refactoring, and explaining their own code later far outweighs the initial investment.

There is a reason for this habit. Reading code forces you into a different mode of thinking than writing does. Writing is generative. You make choices freely, and most of them are not deeply considered in the moment. You pick a variable name because it feels right. You structure a function because the pattern looks familiar. You add an abstraction because someone else did it somewhere and it seemed clever. Reading code forces you to reverse-engineer those decisions. You have to ask why this variable exists, why that branch is structured this way, why the abstraction sits where it does. Sometimes you find good reasoning. Sometimes you find nothing at all. Both outcomes are valuable.

The writing-heavy approach creates what I call the documentation debt problem. Every time you write code without first reading how similar problems were solved in the same codebase, you create a divergence between what the code actually does and what it was intended to do. These divergences accumulate silently. Nobody notices until something breaks, and by then the gap has grown so wide that understanding the system requires more effort than rewriting it from scratch.

I know what some people will say. Reading existing code is slow. We need to ship. The product team is waiting. This is the same argument people make about skipping tests or ignoring code review. It feels urgent in the moment and the consequences show up later, usually on someone else’s watch. The engineers who understand this do not skip reading. They read strategically. They focus on the paths their change will touch. They look for the patterns that matter for their specific problem. They do not read everything, but they always read something before writing.

The real cost of this gap shows up in code reviews. When someone submits a pull request full of clever abstractions and novel patterns that nobody has seen before, the reviewer has to spend extra effort reverse-engineering the intent. When someone submits code that follows established patterns and reads like a natural extension of what came before, the review takes half as long. The difference is not about creativity or skill. It is about whether the writer spent time reading first.

I am not arguing that writing is unimportant. Of course it matters. But I am arguing that we have gotten the order wrong. We teach people to write before they learn to read, and then we wonder why codebases become increasingly incomprehensible over time. The engineers who consistently produce the most maintainable software are not the ones with the most impressive mental catalogs of patterns. They are the ones who treat reading as a first-class activity, not an afterthought.

The next time you need to implement something new, try this before opening your editor. Find the code that does something similar in the same project. Read it carefully. Ask yourself what decisions the author made and why. Then write your solution. It will take longer at first, but you will understand your own code six months from now, which is worth far more than the fifteen minutes you saved by jumping straight in.