[santosha]

I've always enjoyed what I call uncoding, which is taking a working piece of code and taking stuff away until things break, and examining how they break. It's really helped me understand what each piece does, and be more efficient when I'm writing it myself.

[eric_h]

Amusingly, that's also more or less how we've learned to understand the various functions of the different parts of the human brain. We don't know what it does until it's been removed/damaged.

[forgueam]

I love that term. You described exactly how I work: take an existing block of code, break it apart until I fully understand every line, then reassemble to meet my needs.