Comment by brailsafe
6 days ago
> No it doesn't. Typing speed is never the bottleneck for an expert
How could that possibly be true!? Seems like it'd be the same as suggesting being constrained to analog writing utensils wouldn't bottleneck the process of publishing a book or research paper. At the very least such a statement implies that people with ADHD can't be experts.
Completely agree with you. I was working on the front-end of an application and I prompted Claude the following: "The endpoint /foo/bar is returning the json below ##json goes here##, show this as cards inside the component FooBaz following the existing design system".
In less than 5 minutes Claude created code that: - encapsulated the api call - modeled the api response using Typescript - created a re-usable and responsive ui component for the card (including a load state) - included it in the right part of the page
Even if I typed at 200wpm I couldn't produce that much code from such a simple prompt.
I also had similar experiences/gains refactoring back-end code.
This being said, there are cases in which writing the code yourself is faster than writing a detailed enough prompt, BUT those cases are becoming exception with new LLM iteration. I noticed that after the jump from Claude 3.7 to Claude 4 my prompts can be way less technical.
The thing is... does your code end there? Would you put that code in production without a deep analysis of what Claude did?
I’m not who you replied to but I keep functions small and testable paired with unit tests with a healthy mix of happy/sad path.
Afterwards I make sure the LLM passes all the tests before I spend my time to review the code.
I find this process keeps the iterations count low for review -> prompt -> review.
I personally love writing code with an LLM. I’m a sloppy typist but love programming. I find it’s a great burnout prevention.
For context: node.js development/React (a very LLM friendly stack.)
(GP) I wouldn't, but it would get me close enough that I can do the work that's more intellectually stimulating. Sometimes you need the people to do the concrete for a driveway, and sometimes you need to be signing off on the way the concrete was done, perhaps making some tweaks during the early stages.
It seems fair to say that it is ~never the overall bottleneck? Maybe once you figure out what you want, typing speed briefly becomes the bottleneck, but does any expert finish a day thinking "If only I could type twice as fast, I'd have gotten twice as much work done?" That said, I don't think "faster typing" is the only benefit that AI assistance provides.
> How could that possibly be true!?
(I'll assume you're not joking, because your post is ridiculous enough to look like sarcasm.)
The answer is because programmers read code 10 times more (and think about code 100 times more) than they write it.
Yeah, but how fast can you write compared to how fast you think?
How many times have you read a story card and by the time you finished reading it you thought "It's an easy task, should take me 1 hour of work to write the code and tests"?
In my experience, in most of those cases the AI can do the same amount of code writing in under 10 minutes, leaving me the other 50 minutes to review the code, make/ask for any necessary adjustments, and move on to another task.
I don't know anyone who can think faster than they can type (on average), they would have to have an IQ over 150 or something. For mere mortals like myself, reasoning through edge cases and failure conditions and error handling and state invariants takes time. Time that I spend looking at a blinking cursor while the gears spin, or reading code. I've never finished a day where I thought to myself "gosh darn, if only I could type faster this would be done already".
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I wasn't joking, it's a bottleneck sometimes, that's it. It's a bottleneck like comfort and any good tool is a bottleneck, like a slow computer is a bottleneck. It's silly to suggest that your ability to rapidly use a fundamental tool is never a bottleneck, no matter what other bits need to come into play during the course of your day.
My ability to review and understand intent behind code isn't a primarily bottleneck to me actually efficiently reviewing code when it's requested of me, the primary bottleneck is being notified at the right time that I have a waiting request to review code.
If compilers were never a bottleneck, why would we ever try to make them faster? If build tools were never a bottleneck, why would we ever optimize those? These are all just some of the things that can stand between the identification of a problem and producing a solution for it.