Comment by nickdrozd

The comparison with mathematics also makes sense here. It’s much easier to spot typos in other peoples’ work than your own for exactly that reason: when you read back what you wrote, you read back what you meant to write rather than what’s actually there.

Open any textbook (even a fourth edition of a famous one, written by an expert) and you’ll find countless typos. In fact, in a certain sense, the more expert you are the less suitable you are as a proof reader for such books.

I often tell younger engineers that the human brain is the slowest, lowest-memory, and most error-prone runtime for a program. If they're stuck trying to figure out a bug, one of the most effective things they can do is validate their assumptions about what's happening, because there wouldn't be a bug if everything was happening exactly according to expectations.

I, for instance, learned years ago to refuse to help people debug promise chains in languages with async-await semantics. Rewrite it and then get back to me if it still doesn’t work. They usually transcribe the intent of the chain and not the letter of it, fixing the bug they can’t see. And if not the error makes enough sense they can figure it out.

I believe that is the source of "the worst code I have seen is code I wrote six months ago" feeling. It has been long enough that the code has fallen out of your memory, making you less blind to the defects. You can now see it as an outsider would see it.

I don’t think that quote is true in all situations. I have worked with a couple developers long enough their code reads to me as easy as my own.

There's some idiom that says something like "you don't understand something if you can't explain it." I think this is the real point of code review. To make a case for why your code is valuable. If it's just a blob of 1000 lines of "refactor" or "adding feature." It means nothing. A good commit has some kind of abstract tailored to what work was done.

Then a review becomes something like "the claim was made this function does this, does it look like the function does what it says it does?" If you can understand it in context, then you've added trust and knowledge of how it works.

However it seems to often be the case a review turns into "I like this word better than that word" so back to the explaining it point, it becomes a bit of a self review with the hope it might be helpful to somebody else in the future.

This is true and it's one of the problems I have with code generators and these days, AI generated code.

Nothing beats the experience of looking at code you wrote a year ago and thinking “who the hell wrote this nonsense”