> I would prefer to read someone's mental model of how the code works than the code itself.

I find this is often true for me. If there's a bunch of code that I'm having a particularly hard time understanding, it's usually because I don't actually have a working mental model of what the thing is supposed to do.

Problem is, with complex systems often the way to record the mental model is something like a design document, and getting programmers (including myself) to write thoughtful natural language to accompany our code is a constant uphill battle against business pressures to ship more.