I read plenty of books, but I'd struggle to write one because that's a different skill that I don't have.

I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. Is there evidence that someone well-read would also be a bad writer?

I review every diff the clanker makes.

After a few hours of this I still look at the codebase and think "wtf is this?".

I think writing the code is a very important part of understanding it. LLM driven development is like doing maintenance programming from day one.

I've used that as well, it's like starting with a legacy app every time.