It’s been a long time since I did it at school, so I think what I do with code is more “informed by” that process than a duplication of it. But one specific thing I remember was that you look at context. One example I remember from school was reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and how by describing the fog as yellow and a few other details, we could infer that the setting was almost surely London, although that’s not stated. Another fun thing was reading old literature at looking up word after word in the OED to understand what a given word meant at the time that the text was written. This was a mind-blower. All these sentences that seemed very pretty but kind of confusing suddenly became very clear when you interpolate the older meaning. And then every clue you get builds up more context that you can use to infer other aspects about setting, character, etc. So, I think there is a fair amount of inference, but it should always be logically and objectively grounded.