Benjamin Franklin talks about this in his autobiography.

Also Hunter S. Thompson:

> If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess.

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hamburga 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup, though he was also intentional about not copying word-for-word, but rather trying to predict the next token (or phrase).

https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/17/frankin-llm.html

	▲	MomsAVoxell 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This worked wonders for me as a kid, learning computer programming. There was so much knowledge to be gained by typing in 1000’s of lines of other peoples code, published in magazines. I think I probably learned so much more in between the lines during that period, than if I’d just read the user manuals. And the same is true even today - spending a few hours code-reading some wonderful open source project will enlighten you immensely. Code is a social construct - just like music. It prospers in the space between minds, in my opinion.