There's plenty of code that may as well be. I've had a few projects dumped in my lap with "Here, make this work, we need it done in a week." Then you just start adding print statements and slowly build your map around the code. It's tedious, and sometimes (actually almost always) painful, but you will gain a lot of respect for being autonomous and you will have a much better grasp of how the code works.
Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're god damn right I'm living in the fucking past