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I once merged an AI-generated PR without reading a single line. CI was green, I shipped it… and staging exploded. Here’s why RTFC still matters in 2025.
Confession time: I shipped code I never actually read. Copilot wrote the whole thing, CI went green, and I hit merge. An hour later, staging was dead in the water. The logs pointed to a function that didn’t even exist in the library. That’s when it hit me: the old “RTFC” rule isn’t dead it just comes back to bite you when you least expect it.
Developers used to live by RTFC (Read The Fing Code*). If the docs sucked or APIs lied, you had no choice. Now? We trust frameworks, pipelines, and even AI copilots to catch mistakes. And honestly, 90% of the time they do… until they don’t.
This article is about that shift. Why we stopped reading code. How automation and AI made it easier to look away. The hidden dangers of blind trust. And, most importantly, a cheat-sheet for knowing when you actually need to RTFC.
TLDR: Dev culture moved from “always read” to “ship fast, trust the abstractions.” That’s efficient but fragile. I’ll break down when blind trust works, when it fails, and give you a decision table you can bookmark for those “oh crap” moments.
The old rule: RTFC
Before Stack Overflow, before “just ask Copilot,” there was one rule every dev eventually learned the hard way: RTFC Read The Fing Code*.
This wasn’t just some grumpy-senior meme. It was survival. Docs were outdated, if they existed at all. APIs lied. And when you hit a bug, no one was swooping in with an autocomplete suggestion. Your only option was to dive into the source.
Everyone’s got their first RTFC story. Mine was with a crusty C library in college. I was debugging a segfault that showed up only when you passed in “weird” inputs. Hours of Googling = nothing. Finally, I cracked open the source and found out the function literally returned a pointer to freed memory. The docs didn’t say it, the tutorials didn’t warn you, but the code sure did. That’s when I realized RTFC wasn’t optional it was a survival skill.
And it wasn’t just me. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve either debugged a kernel panic, cracked open Python’s standard library, or read through some cryptic macro jungle in a C header file. That was the culture: if you wanted answers, you read the code.
The code itself was the documentation. Reading it wasn’t the backup plan it was the plan.
Today’s vibe: trust the tools
Fast forward to 2025, and most devs don’t crack open source unless they’re forced to. The new rule isn’t RTFC it’s trust the tools.
Need a database? You npm install prisma. Need machine learning? Import PyTorch. Need to deploy? Let GitHub Actions push to prod while you sip coffee. The stack is so abstracted now that you can go months without ever looking at someone else’s code.
And honestly? It works. Docs are better, frameworks cover 95% of cases, and CI/CD pipelines yell at you the second you do something stupid. Forget a semicolon? Linter shames you. Break a test? Pipeline blocks the merge. Type mismatch? Compiler has your back.
It’s like driving an automatic instead of stick you don’t need to know clutch timing anymore because the car just… goes. And in dev terms, that means shipping features faster and sleeping more.
But here’s the trade-off: automation tells you what’s wrong it doesn’t tell you why. CI can say “this test failed,” but if the root cause is buried in three layers of a dependency, you’re back to square one. And if you’ve never trained that RTFC muscle? Debugging feels less like coding and more like fighting a raid boss blindfolded.
So yeah, today’s dev culture is built on trust. Trust the abstractions, trust the AI, trust the pipeline. But the bill comes due when the abstraction cracks and suddenly, you realize you forgot how to fight without your power-ups.
The danger of blind trust
Trusting abstractions feels safe until it isn’t. The danger of skipping RTFC is that you’re building on foundations you don’t actually understand. And when those foundations wobble, you’re left holding the pager with no idea where to even start.
The most famous example? left-pad. In 2016, one tiny npm package (11 lines of code!) got unpublished, and suddenly half the JavaScript ecosystem went nuclear. Build systems failed, CI pipelines died, and devs everywhere were frantically Googling “what the hell is left-pad?” No one had read it. Why would you? But that blind trust turned into a global outage. (link for receipts)
Or take dependency hell. You upgrade one Python package, and suddenly nothing imports because three other libraries depended on the old version. The error message is useless. The docs? Out of date. The only way out is cracking open the code and figuring out how the pieces fit.
These moments expose the cost of comfort. If you never flex your RTFC muscle, hitting one of these edge cases feels like dropping into a Dark Souls boss fight thinking it’s just another tutorial. YOU DIED.
Abstractions buy us speed. But they also stack up skill debt. The longer you coast, the harder it is to handle the day when the abstraction betrays you. And it will.
When RTFC still saves you
For all the trust we put in frameworks and pipelines, there are still moments where nothing absolutely nothing beats reading the code.
Performance debugging is the classic one. You’re staring at a profiler, and it says 80% of your runtime is spent inside some cryptic library call. Docs don’t mention it. Stack Overflow has bad guesses. Copilot keeps suggesting the same broken fix. The only way forward? Pop open the source and figure out why your app is chugging like it’s running on a Raspberry Pi taped to a toaster.
Security exploits are another. When you see a package get hit with a CVE, it usually means some researcher literally opened the source, spotted an injection vector, and proved it. If you’re patching production under fire, you can’t just trust “npm audit fix.” You need to know exactly what’s broken and why. (CVE database link)
And then there are the weird edge cases. Every dev’s got one. I once inherited a Python microservice that kept crashing in prod, but only on Tuesdays. We thought the logs were trolling us. Turns out the bug lived in a dependency’s scheduler logic it was miscalculating ISO week numbers. We only solved it because someone finally opened the library source and saw the gnarly date math.
Those are the moments where RTFC doesn’t just save you time it saves the whole project. And once you’ve been through one of those, you never forget it.
Where AI fits in
Now we’ve got a new layer on top of everything: AI copilots. And let’s be honest most of us are doing RTAI now: Read The AI output.
You type a vague comment, Copilot or ChatGPT spits out 20 lines of code, and you just… trust it. It looks clean, it compiles, tests pass, so you merge. Feels like cheating in a speedrun.
But here’s the trap: AI isn’t a correctness engine it’s a confidence engine. It’ll generate functions that don’t exist, use deprecated APIs, or subtly mis-handle edge cases. There’s even a Reddit gem where Copilot invented a function that never existed in Python’s standard library looked legit, until it blew up in prod. (receipt)
We all know this dance:
- Copilot: “Trust me, it works.”
- Compiler: “lol nope.”
The real danger isn’t just bad output it’s atrophy. If you never read the code, never sanity-check AI output, you lose the RTFC muscle. And when AI leads you off a cliff, you’ll realize you don’t remember how to climb back up without it.
So in a way, AI brings us full circle. It makes us faster 90% of the time, but when it screws up, the only way out is the oldest rule in the book: read the fing code.
Balanced take: modern RTFC
So what’s the move? Do we go back to reading every line of every library, or keep shipping blind and praying CI has our back? Reality is somewhere in between.
You don’t need to crack open every .js or .py file. That’s not practical. But you do need to know when to break the glass and RTFC. Think of it like a raid boss you don’t waste potions on trash mobs, but when the boss enrages, you pull out everything you’ve got.
Here’s the cheat-sheet I wish someone gave me earlier:
Bookmark this. It’s the modern RTFC playbook.
And to show what this looks like in practice, here’s a real before/after receipt from my own AI mishap:
# Default: trusting the AI (looked fine, passed CI)
df = users.merge(accounts, on="id") # silently dropped unmatched rows
# After RTFC:
# learned Pandas defaults to INNER JOIN, not OUTER
df = users.merge(accounts, on="id", how="outer")
The first version “worked” until we noticed entire users were missing in staging. Reading the Pandas source (and tests!) revealed the default join logic. Without that RTFC dive, we would’ve shipped silent data loss to prod.
That’s the point: automation, abstractions, even AI copilots they’re fine 90% of the time. But when you hit the other 10%, knowing when to crack open the code is what separates the devs who ship fixes from the ones still copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers at 3 a.m.
Conclusion
Maybe we did lose something by not reading code. Old-school RTFC made you sharper, forced you to understand systems instead of just wiring them together. That skill was painful to earn, but once you had it, you could debug anything.
On the flip side, the trade-off isn’t all bad. Abstractions, automation, and AI let us ship faster, build cooler stuff, and avoid burning nights in malloc hell. Most of the time, skipping RTFC is the rational choice it’s like using fast travel in a game. Why walk when you can teleport?
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: when the system breaks in a way the docs and pipelines can’t explain, the only people who can save it are the ones who can still open the hood and read the raw code. If you’ve let that muscle atrophy, you’re just hoping someone else on the team hasn’t.
So maybe the new mantra isn’t RTFC or die. It’s: trust the tools by default, but never lose the ability to RTFC when it counts. Think of it like fire escape training you don’t practice every day, but when the alarm goes off, you’re glad you know the way out.
What’s next? Probably more AI, more automation, and more developers who never touch a line outside their framework. But as long as bugs exist and they always will the devs who can still drop to the metal and read the code will be the ones holding the keys when everything else fails.
Over to you: when’s the last time you had to RTFC? Was it a left-pad-style disaster, or some AI hallucination blowing up in prod? Drop your war stories I guarantee half of them end with “and that’s when I finally read the code.”
Resources
Want to keep your RTFC muscle alive? Here are some good rabbit holes and references:
- Linux Kernel Source the original “read it or get wrecked” codebase.
- GitHub Actions Docs where automation babysits most of us today.
- Stack Overflow still the unofficial doc site for half the internet.
- OpenAI Cookbook peek under the hood if you’re rolling with AI copilots.
- CVE Database every exploit here exists because someone, somewhere, read the code.
- npm left-pad incident the meltdown that proved we sometimes should read even the tiniest packages.
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