Taming the Genie: How to Read the Code You Just Wished Into Existence

You’ve rubbed the lamp—an AI genie handed you 1,000 shiny lines and it all runs, for now. Peek behind the purple smoke, trace each spell, and keep your newfound magic from biting back.

“NATE—what job skills survive the AI apoclaypse? What really matters?”

I get this question a lot. This is my #1 most transferable answer. Learn to read code. Don’t learn to produce code. Learn to read code.

Back in March, when I published The Vibe Coding Bible, we all got drunk on speed. Short prompt → working feature → ship before lunch—​that rush was the whole point. But over the last few months something kept nagging me. I’d paste a fresh AI-generated file into a repo and feel a tiny knot in my stomach: Wait… do I actually know what this thing is doing?

Too often I’m in a rush and the answer is “kinda—let’s ship it.” And for some stuff that’s ok.

But to get better at actually building things, it’s not enough.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve arrived at: writing code is getting cheaper by the week; reading code is compounding in value. Autocomplete can flood a project with thousands of lines overnight, but it can’t tell you whether a single silent failure is hiding in that flood. Being able to scan those lines, spot the brittle bridge, and ask the one question that saves a future outage is now the rare skill—​and you don’t need to be a seasoned engineer to learn it.

I looked around for a practical, beginner-friendly guide and found… nothing. So I wrote the one I wanted to read. Think of this piece as the sequel to the Vibe Coding Bible: Part I showed you how to summon code; Part II shows you how to see it—​to understand the structures you’re creating, evolve them safely, and unlock the biggest productivity lever AI has handed us yet.

And yes, you can read this one even if you don’t know how to Vibe Code yet, because tbh if you can read code you’re going to go so much faster at picking up vibe coding anyway, so the skill transfers.

CTO’s have sometimes judged engineering productivity by the number of lines of code typed. It has always been a terrible measure. Not least because elegant code is often shorter. But then LLMs arrive and they can now write a thousand lines of code before I’ve finished my coffee.

With AI getting stronger every day at coding, code production is no longer anybody’s leverage—while ​reading and understanding code is rapidly becoming profoundly valuable.

Read on for an actual, accessible guide to reading code. YES, even if you’ve never coded before.