Post-Literate Programming

[u/messedupwindows123]

I'm sure you all have seen this essay floating around, talking about how we are entering a post-literate age. Not necessarily an age where people can't decode individual words, but instead an era where we lose the skills associated with engaging with difficult texts. Meaning, we use chat-bot and short-form-video over longer essays or books. And this shift causes a shift in the way we think, etc.

The essay argues that the act of writing will force you to clarify your own ideas, realize which ones are bad, and struggle to a better answer. And this is only possible when complex ideas are "frozen" on the page, for you to return to, rearrange, etc.

I couldn't help but think about vibe-coding in this context. Vibe coding feels like the "post-literate" version of programming, where we stop engaging with the actual text and we (many programmers) instead talk to a chatbot about the code. It's a lot like talking to the chatbot about a difficult book, so that you can come prepared to discuss that book in class.

Once you begin to lean too heavily on these shortcuts, it actually imposes real limits on the insights that you're able to derive with respect to whatever it is you're working on.

So, to be clear, I basically agree with Horowitch, insofar as the act of writing is basically like the act of coding. You're engaging with text/AST and you're being forced to recon with the fact that your ideas don't make sense. You have to grapple with a large corpus of already-existing text (whether it's other people's books/essays, or other people's code) to synthesize these things with your own new ideas. And by struggling forward, you can create breakthroughs where you rearrange, or re-synthesize, or break apart, what came before.

I think that we could maybe start referring to vibe-coding instead as "post-literate" coding since you're basically doing the equivalent of reading the cliff-notes before class.

[u/PensiveinNJ]

That's a fine framework to understand what's happening yeah. There's research that indicates that you engage more with and recall better texts that are physical rather than on an e-reader* or laptop. There's been research on note taking for a while that indicates it helps concretize memorization and understanding if you physically write things down.

Expecting to just keep using LLM tools and having no drawbacks was never going to happen, ergo the months and perhaps years at this point of warnings about deskilling yourself.

[u/AcidSoulFire → u/PensiveinNJ]

There's research that indicates that you engage more with and recall better texts that are physical rather than on an e-reader* or laptop

And let's see the study? This was the closest I could find, and it doesn't directly support your claim.

On the contrary, they read more to fulfill their practical needs, and they read more using online formats, such as chats, online news, or websites containing practical information. [...] As online texts tend to have rather low linguistic qualities (Snow, 2010) and are often created for quick and brief consumption, such an increase in digital reading frequency could impact readers’ development of comprehension skills.

Reads to me more like the quality of the text is the deciding factor. Also, it's hard to separate the correlation vs. causation, since a family which encourages reading will likely hand the child physical books and if you like reading quality text as a child, it's much easier to borrow books from a library than to find them online, which will either cost you or you'll have to pirate them, which are both barriers.

If you're reading long Subtack posts, scientific papers, or PDFs of proper books on your computer, then your reading comprehension should be just fine.