Post #1467650

2026-04-17 00:04 UTC

While there are many cases made for coding LLMs, one that keeps coming up that I literally don&#39;t understand is &quot;it will save us so much time typing.&quot; I&#39;ve seen a lot of people push back on this with very sensible points, like that most of software development is not the process of entering code into files, but planning, designing, coordinating with other teams, and so on. But it occurs to me that for some of the folks hung up on the &quot;less typing&quot; point, maybe a lot of them (specifically those repeating this point) just never learned to touch-type, so text entry really is a bottleneck for them? Is that a plausible source of some of this? Do they teach typing in schools anymore? I still occasionally encounter an upper-level CS or SE students who is doing hunt-and-peck. I don&#39;t think it&#39;s taught in my kid&#39;s school, despite having a &quot;computers&quot; class (middle school). I was required to take a &quot;keyboarding&quot; class (i.e., typing) in middle school, though I actually learned earlier via Mario Teaches Typing (the only educational software I&#39;m fully convinced works).

Replies (4)

@dysfun@social.treehouse.systems 2026-04-17 00:11

@csgordon they did teach me typing at college. i have a distinctly mid 55wpm at 100% accuracy and i'm never normally typing that fast anyway. i can believe some people think that their typing is the bottleneck, but if they're right, that doesn't make me think they're extremely fast thinkers, it makes me think they're extremely sloppy thinkers.

Open ##1513685
@pkhuong@discuss.systems 2026-04-17 00:13

@csgordon yeah… i definitely type faster than LLMs spit out tokens. but i can only use one keyboard at a time. FWIW, my kid's school is trying to teach them touch typing… on ipads.

Open ##1513686
@samgoree@hci.social 2026-04-17 01:02

@csgordon I seriously think the reason some of my students use LLMs to code is because they feel like they know what to write but typing it out with two fingers is too much work. They're also very used to spellcheck and struggle to type correctly without it. Idk if they had computer class, but they definitely didn't master typing before college.

Open ##1513690
@carloangiuli@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-17 02:23

@csgordon After teaching HtDP to freshmen for a few years I am convinced that the problem is poor *text editing* skills specifically, compounded by poor typing skills. It takes many students considerable time and effort to locate relevant code, move the cursor to a specific location, swap the order of two arguments to a function, etc. (We are using DrRacket but I think using a fancier editor would be even worse.) Watching them edit code on their laptops probably looks a lot like if I were trying to edit code in the Notes app on my phone, and I wonder if that's because that's where most of their text input is happening nowadays??

Open ##1513693