Real Programmers Don’t Read Code

OPENING

Back in the good old days — the Golden Era of computing, roughly March 2025 — it was easy to separate the Real Programmers from the Quiche Eaters.

Real Programmers orchestrated. Quiche Eaters typed.

A Real Programmer said things like "spin up six subagents and gate on the eval suite," and the Quiche Eaters said things like "I prefer to understand my own code" — a sentence with the same energy as roasting your own coffee beans or churning your own butter.

But times change.

We are faced today with a troubling resurgence. Quiche Eaters are being hired again — as "reviewers," as "verification engineers," as people whose entire job is to look at things.

Some companies now employ a person to read what the agents wrote, the way some hotels employ a man to open a door that opens itself.

There is a clear need to point out the differences between this ceremonial role and the Real Programmer — if only to explain to employers why the door-opener is the one they should let go.

At a considerable salary saving.

LANGUAGES

Real Programmers write English.

Quiche Eaters write TypeScript, which is English with anxiety.

Real Programmers don't know what language the codebase is in. Knowing is coupling.

Legacy code is defined as anything a human wrote.

A well-known keyboard-first developer was once asked why they still type their own code. They replied that typing helps them think.
One can tell immediately from this comment that they are a Quiche Eater. Thinking is what the tokens are for.

Real Programmers do frontend in English.

Real Programmers do infrastructure in English.

Real Programmers do cryptography in English, which is why several of them are no longer allowed to.

If you can't do it in English, add more context. If you still can't do it, it wasn't in the training data, and therefore isn't worth doing.

READING CODE

The academics have gotten into the "code comprehension" rut.

They claim systems are more easily maintained if the programmer reads them. Their studies invariably examine codebases small enough to read — clearly not enough to convince anyone.

Real Programmers don't read code. Reading is a smell. If you have to read it, the spec was wrong.

Real Programmers don't debug. They regenerate. Debugging is archaeology; regeneration is manufacturing. Nobody repairs a paper cup.

Real Programmers don't reproduce bugs. Reproduction only encourages them.

Real Programmers have replaced root-cause analysis with asking "why did you do that?" in an increasingly disappointed tone.

A merge conflict is a prompt-quality issue.

Real Programmers have never seen a for loop, in the way that airline pilots have never seen a wing spar. It's down there somewhere.

Quiche Eaters claim code is read more often than it is written. Real Programmers have fixed this. Code is now written more often than it is read, at a ratio improving every quarter.

As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the conversation history.

A Real Programmer knows the limits of every context window except their own — an issue they have been dealing with for six months now.

PROGRAMMING

The typical Quiche Eater writes commit messages like: fixed bug
The Real Programmer's commits arrive with epic, richly structured, beautifully human-readable detail — which is touching, since no human will ever read them.

Real Programmers run --dangerously-skip-permissions because asking permission is a human latency problem.

Real Programmers review pull requests at a steady rate of one every eleven seconds.

The test suite exists to make the pipeline green. The pipeline exists to make the dashboard green. The dashboard exists so that nobody has to read the code, see above, and so on - forever.

The agents read documentation so you don't have to. The agent also wrote it, closing a loop the industry chased for fifty years.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK

You can be sure no Real Programmer would be caught dead implementing a ticket. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking volume.

Real Programmers work across ten repositories simultaneously and could not name three of them.

Real Programmers ship forty features a sprint, some of which were requested.

Real Programmers don't attend standup. Their agents post the update, which is also who did the work, so arguably attendance is perfect.

Real Programmers run evals on their agents, which in-turn run evals on their solutions. Real Programmers are aware that they, too, are in someone's eval harness - and up their token count accordingly.

Real Programmers welcome an agent into their 1:1s, purely "for the notes." The notes are excellent. They contain several things nobody said, which both parties have since adopted as commitments.

Real Programmers ship on Friday at 5pm. The agents work weekends; solidarity is a Quiche Eater concept.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY

At a party, the Real Programmer is the one photographing the buffet and asking what to eat. Selections with a 70% confidence score may make it onto the plate - they are rarely eaten.

Real Programmers win their fantasy football league every season and could not name a single player.

Real Programmers never forget an anniversary. The gift arrives on time, thoughtfully chosen, beautifully wrapped, and is a surprise to everyone. Including them.

Real Programmers read their children a story every night. The story is new every night, infinitely long, and adapts to feedback. The children have started asking for the old book — the one that ends the same way twice.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT

The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a 3 screen workstation. Surrounding it is.

Nothing.

The listings are gone.

The manuals are gone.

The three cups of cold coffee are gone; the sessions run whether anyone drinks or not.

A standing desk, standing.

12 panes, 48 agents, each convinced it is the only one.

And one sticky note, quite old, in handwriting that looks vaguely familiar:

check the diff.

Nobody knows who wrote it.

THE FUTURE

It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation is not being brought up with the same outlook.

Some universities have begun teaching students to read code, audit diffs, and "understand the system."

Graduates these days are soft — protected from the realities of shipping by comprehension. Worst of all, some of these alleged engineers manage to graduate without ever having burned a million tokens on a Tuesday.

From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere.

The context windows grow.

The evals improve.

The dashboards have never been greener.

And on the rare occasion the agent is wrong — deeply, structurally, expensively wrong, wrong in a way the tests were generated not to notice — we simply —

The sticky note is still there.