Post

gabby
@fullmoon.id

One of my big boundaries for my personal LLM usage is to never let the LLM author any prose or code for me. I always type it out myself Hell, even in the pre-LLM era I never used IDE tools for code generation. Typing/writing things out or saying something in my own words is very important to me

gabby
@fullmoon.id

My reason for doing this is very similar to why rubber duck debugging works so well: the act of saying something in one's own words (or to type it out with one's own fingers) forces one to make a deeper level of mental contact with it than we normally would and greatly improves accuracy/quality

1 repost34 likes

gabby
@fullmoon.id

I vaguely remember that back in the day Zed Shaw's "Learn X the hard way" courses would begin every course by saying "DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THE EXAMPLES IN THIS COURSE. TYPE THEM OUT" and he said the reason why is because the act of typing it out greatly improves your comprehension of the material

zendarva.bsky.social
@zendarva.bsky.social

One way i've found to help with this is to implement the examples in a *different* language than the one presented in whatever learning source you're using. You've got to at least understand it a little to transform it.

gabby
@fullmoon.id

Typing is also not wasted time! Your brain doesn't shut off when you type something out. Your mind brainstorms and thinks actively about useful related things in the background. That sort of regular mental downtime to reflect about what's going on is important to sustainable coding work

cutterferry.bsky.social
@cutterferry.bsky.social

Sometimes as you sculpt it, the clay speaks back to you! (Reminds me of 1 of the more problematic Qs for “spec driven dev”: for sufficiently good spec engineering, you prob want the spec itself to enable a kind of extended cognition (cf. good mathematical notn.) But then isn’t your spec ~code?)

gabby
@fullmoon.id

Also, for coding specifically, if typing is really tedious **you notice** and that is often the best way to spot an opportunity to refactor and reduce duplicate code. People who type things out have a much lower tolerance for repetition and automate more of their work

gabby
@fullmoon.id

Also, I just want everything I say, write, or create to have a little bit of my personality or mark on it. I don't want to author sterile undifferentiated slop. That's not great for me (it takes all the joy out of it) and not great for other people (nobody enjoys receiving slop either)

※ Kora
@koragendum.bsky.social

From what I understand, historically, a lot of the great composers would copy out music by hand, both in order to have their own copy and as a means of study.