The person he replied said code is primarily for communicating with other people. I'm not sure how else to interpret that than what is literally written down.
Human language is imperfect: they never said "other" people, but just "humans" (this includes oneself, for example).
So you are already not interpreting it literally: none of us can avoid our biases (also, machine code is code too, yet nobody misinterpreted that).
I took that quote to mean that we go through the extra trouble of writing nice code for humans to be able to reason about the code, and especially to update when changes are needed: that makes it the primary reason we invent programming languages instead of going with machine code directly.
You than take primarily to not mean primarily. I mean sure you can do that, I don't find it very convincing. It's possible they misspoke(or wrote) but that's not really the fault of the person reacting to what they said.
So you are already not interpreting it literally: none of us can avoid our biases (also, machine code is code too, yet nobody misinterpreted that).
I took that quote to mean that we go through the extra trouble of writing nice code for humans to be able to reason about the code, and especially to update when changes are needed: that makes it the primary reason we invent programming languages instead of going with machine code directly.