> Before AI, typing speed didn’t matter much for programming, because everyone needed to take time to think through problems, come up with a good solution, and debug.
And also because a good IDE would autocomplete somewhere between 70% to 90% of the result.
Most people who spend time in front of a keyboard should without effort should attain 60 words per minute naturally. With decent techniques, you can go up to 80 wpm. Now there are speed typers who can do 250 wpm. Can you really think meaningfully at that speeds, in a way that it can be understood and is useful ?
At that point one could argue that running your own server to get instant responses from your llm matters, while we are at it, compile times, tests, search queries, could always use be shaved some milliseconds per.
With speed reader tools I can comfortably read and understand 500 wpm, should we now switch to speed readers since we read code more often than we write it ?
No, in reality, you create software faster when the code you write the first time doesn't result in errors, which requires knowledge of your stack.
Even if you are not looking to read your code, LLMs also benefit from good programming practices, some of these programming practices should produce code which is clear, changeable and extendable
If you're typing, and not using speech-to-text (eg WisprFlow), you're still slow. I don't use STT for everything, but I'm definitely faster at talking than typing. Problem is, thinking speed is also a bottleneck.
> but I'm definitely faster at talking than typing
I tend to be much more verbose when talking, compared to typing. So, while talking might be technically faster if you measure words/min or symbols/min, I don't think that the speed of actually expressing ideas is higher. Talking just tends to have more repetitions (reiterating the same idea with slightly different wording) and filler words that don't really mean anything.
> Before AI, typing speed didn’t matter much for programming, because everyone needed to take time to think through problems, come up with a good solution, and debug.
And also because a good IDE would autocomplete somewhere between 70% to 90% of the result.
Most people who spend time in front of a keyboard should without effort should attain 60 words per minute naturally. With decent techniques, you can go up to 80 wpm. Now there are speed typers who can do 250 wpm. Can you really think meaningfully at that speeds, in a way that it can be understood and is useful ?
At that point one could argue that running your own server to get instant responses from your llm matters, while we are at it, compile times, tests, search queries, could always use be shaved some milliseconds per.
With speed reader tools I can comfortably read and understand 500 wpm, should we now switch to speed readers since we read code more often than we write it ?
No, in reality, you create software faster when the code you write the first time doesn't result in errors, which requires knowledge of your stack.
Even if you are not looking to read your code, LLMs also benefit from good programming practices, some of these programming practices should produce code which is clear, changeable and extendable
If you're typing, and not using speech-to-text (eg WisprFlow), you're still slow. I don't use STT for everything, but I'm definitely faster at talking than typing. Problem is, thinking speed is also a bottleneck.
> but I'm definitely faster at talking than typing
I tend to be much more verbose when talking, compared to typing. So, while talking might be technically faster if you measure words/min or symbols/min, I don't think that the speed of actually expressing ideas is higher. Talking just tends to have more repetitions (reiterating the same idea with slightly different wording) and filler words that don't really mean anything.
I would add digestion speed to the mix, for me it is somewhat different from thinking