The Skill Nobody Teaches: Learning to Read Code
By Nasly Duarte
Readers of this blog know I am building an AI product in real time.
That product — Soulaccess, a phone-based access tech to enter churches during un — requires me to read, understand, and extend code I did not write. It requires me to direct AI coding agents and evaluate what they produce. And it requires me to teach these skills to a community of people who want to build alongside me.
Which is why this series exists.
Most churches sit empty 90 percent of the week. Meanwhile, the people who fund those churches experience grief, anxiety, and crisis at the hours when those buildings are locked. That's broken. !I'm building a Phone-based access app to sacred space, anytime soulaccessprototype.netlify.app
The Overlooked Skill
Developers spend ten times more time reading code than writing it. That is not a statistic from a research paper. It is the lived reality of every developer working on a team, fixing a bug, reviewing a pull request, or building on an existing codebase.
School teaches writing. The real world demands reading.
The mismatch is significant. By the time you are hired into a technical role, you walk into a codebase you have never seen and are expected to produce output by Friday. The ability to orient yourself inside someone else's system — to find the entry point, trace the flow, understand the structure — separates productive builders from people who ask questions for two weeks before touching anything.
This matters more now, not less, because of AI coding tools. When you prompt an agent to build something, it produces code. That code might be correct. It might have subtle errors. It might follow patterns that conflict with the rest of your project. The only way to evaluate what an agent gives you is to be able to read it.
Reading code in the AI era is not about memorizing syntax. It is about the ability to open a project and understand its structure, trace one feature through an entire system, identify patterns that repeat, and notice what is well-designed versus what is a red flag.
The Six Situations
Reading code happens in six recurring situations, each with a different objective.
The first-day read happens at a new job or when you inherit a project. You are not looking for details yet. You are asking: how is this structured and where do I start?
The bug read happens when you are assigned to fix code someone else wrote. You are asking: what was this supposed to do and where did it break?
The review read happens during a pull request or code review. You are asking: does this work, is it clean, and will it cause problems later?
The learning read happens when you open a well-built project to study it. You are asking: how did they solve this and can I use this pattern?
The library read happens when you want to understand a tool you are already using. You are asking: how does this actually work under the hood?
The inheritance read happens when someone leaves and their code stays. You are asking: what is this doing and why did they do it this way?
Each situation asks a different question but uses the same foundational skill. The ability to read unfamiliar code confidently and orient yourself inside a system you did not build.
The Build-in-Public Context
I am teaching this skill because I am living it.
The Itemizing build — which I am documenting publicly for my community — requires me to read repositories I have never opened, understand patterns I have never implemented, and adapt them for a product I am building as I go. The agent workshop at Agentcamp gave me working code to read. Open-source libraries I am evaluating require me to assess quality before I commit to them. AI agents produce code that I need to understand before I push it to production.
Every principle in this series is one I applied this week, on a real product, in a real codebase.
The Framework: The Bird's Eye View
The next post in this series introduces The Bird's Eye View — a three-step methodology for opening any codebase without panic. It is the first pass developers use before reading a single line of logic code. The file structure. The entry point. The config files that reveal a project's DNA in thirty seconds.
This is the methodology I applied when I opened the Itemizing repository for the first time. It is the methodology I am teaching in the summer curriculum. And it is the methodology that turns a 50,000-line codebase from overwhelming to navigable.
The Bottom Line
Reading code is not a secondary skill. It is the primary skill of anyone building products, reviewing AI output, or working on any codebase that existed before they arrived. The faster you develop it, the faster every other technical skill follows.
Building this in public, one codebase at a time.
Follow the full summer curriculum — including weekly code reading challenges, a live build log, and community events — at the Mindful Dollar BMAC community. The curriculum is live now and designed for people who want to build, not just read about building.
Join the Mindful Dollar BMAC Community →
Read Next: The Bird's Eye View: How Developers Open Unfamiliar Code
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