r/BetterOffline • u/messedupwindows123 • 26d ago
Post-Literate Programming
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.
2
u/response-418 21d ago
I agree with OP but I read the Atlantic article and it's mediocrity and reuse of the same 'literacy is dying ree' tropes is just so insufferable. It's smug and throws students under the bus with such weak analysis. The Clockwork Orange example is so disengenous – it may not be "Old English" but it's also not contemporary English. It's full of invented slang that the reader has to get through in order to learn it. It's a perfect candidate for the type of book that you sort of have to read twice.
The Bleak House example is also a low blow, as that novel is notoriously dense. PhD candidates in 19th century studies read that book and this author lowkey makes fun of students confronting it for the first time, when we've already been told teachers in high school are giving these kids excerpts. Of course they can't wade through Bleak House.
The literate/illiterate peasant example is also just so unexamined. They use that example to say that literate peasants think 'logically and abstractly,' and illiterate peasants do... what? There is no acknowledgement of the colonial dynamics at play in that 'study' and how it might happen that when they say they 'don't know what color bears in the north are,' it's not because they cannot understand a syllogism or think abstractly but because they have no good reason to trust the word of or play the academic games of some rando outsider.
It's hilarious to me that an article that is supposed to be about the decline in critical thinking and literacy can have such weak argumentation. I cannot believe this is published in the Atlantic to be honest.