I don't think it's fair to separate the code and the software itself. I personally don't feel proud of the result of a piece of software if the code is crappy, i.e. spaghetti code, (almost) unreadable, unmaintainable, ...

I think what the author wanted to emphasize was the importance of code clarity, as many of us developers don't actually care. Bad code builds up negative tech debts that somebody has to pay at some point in the future.