I'm not sure. And to be honest, typing speed was never that big a deal. By the time I got out of college a few decades ago I was in the 110-120wpm range.

However as I progressed in my career as a developer what I found is that both my "working" WPM and then my "normal" WPM dropped over time. Once I moved out of truly junior, pure code grinding roles, I spent more and more time thinking, talking to people, etc than I did typing. At that point, what does it matter if I'm at 20wpm or 200?

Likewise, in day to day life, it's not like I'm sitting there typing a novel. I'm mostly clicking buttons, writing short messages, tweet,s and the like. My day to day typing speed has also decreased. I'm sure it's still up around 80-100wpm, but it's rare that I'm sitting there typing long enough to matter.

Same with LLM. Who cares if it takes me 10 seconds or 20 seconds to type in a prompt, when it's going to sit there and spin for a minute anyways?

▲

rgoulter 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To an extent, but not to that extent.

There's a significant difference between (say) 20wpm and 100wpm. -- Your comment is 150-200 words; so that's the difference between spending two or three minutes vs ten (just typing it out, not counting the time it takes to think).

If you limited your typing throughput to 10wpm, how long of a comment are you really going to reply with? Probably not a long one. -- If someone types at 160 wpm, are they going to type a better comment than someone typing at 80 wpm? Maybe? Maybe not? Probably not twice as long / twice as good.

I still think "typing speed is about latency, not throughput" is the key perspective. (Followed by diminishing returns. I think around 80wpm is fine). -- There are some cases where I'm doing the activity so infrequently that the cost of improving outweighs any benefit I'll see.

▲

LtWorf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm pretty sure that also people who write novels aren't held back by how fast they can type.

	▲	jghn 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Probably not. It was a euphemism.
	▲	TZubiri 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But it's a pretty good indicator of skill level. High wpm means they write a lot. It's also helpful as a burst speed. It doesn't mean you are always cranking at 120wpm, but you can hit 120wpm when the words in your mental buffer is overloaded and you can empty that fast. Try writing on pen and paper, you'll find that your mental buffer fills up quickly and you aren't able to hold all of your thoughts, so you have to drop some. It has its use cases, sometimes you have to think more and write less. But in general high entropy write capacity is a valuable spec to have.