I try to explain what I mean the next few sentences of the post. I have spent a good amount of my career jumping into fairly large code bases. I don't need to take it quite so step by step. I have seen enough code to take shortcuts, to guess at what is there.

But telling people that isn't helpful. I try at the beginning to give more step by step of how I would get into understand the code base if I didn't already know these kinds of shortcuts. (I'm not sure I could write those down, they are just know how and heuristics, like how when you are a starting to code a missing ; can take a much longer time to see than as you've been programming for a while)

I thought that was curious. He says this isn’t how he would do it today then goes on to do it today (or presumably the same day he wrote that he wouldn’t do it this way today).