Do Machines Struggle Where Humans Do? Obfuscation as a Probe of Human and Machine Code Comprehension

Code obfuscation targets human comprehension, but current evaluations primarily measure language model performance degradation instead of whether models fail in the same way as humans. A direct comparison across five obfuscation tiers reveals that comprehension difficulty is non-monotonic. Only reasoning-tuned models mirror human difficulty patterns. This alignment, rather than raw accuracy, distinguishes robust comprehension from brittle pattern matching.