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▲ aarushyadav a day ago

Most people type at 40-50 WPM. Developers can often type at 70-100 WPM. Meanwhile, most people can talk at 120-200 WPM. Beyond just speed, we've found with many people that talking things out tends to flow more naturally, since it's often a lower friction action so people don't "sanitize" the text in their head before outputting it. Leads to better prompts quite often :)

▲achandra03 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> talking things out tends to flow more naturally,

I've found the opposite. Typing feels much more "deliberate", and of course you can hit backspace but you can't un-speak a word. With prompting, I've found that, in general, speaking leads to lower-quality results than typing.

▲gavinray a day ago | parent | next [-]

My spouse and I have a rule that if we think a discussion is going to be emotionally charged, we have it over text in different rooms.

It sounds autistic, but writing and reading allow you to be much more precise, careful, and deliberate with your words and helps reduce impulsive outbursts.

This has worked really well for us, as crazy as it sounds.

▲gwd 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Letters play a big part in the plots of Jane Austen's novels for a good reason.

▲esseph a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> My spouse and I have a rule that if we think a discussion is going to be emotionally charged, we have it over text in different rooms.

I've done this myself with my wife and I.

> It sounds autistic

Well, I'm autistic, and she has a very high traumatic intelligence. She reads my body language, expressions, movements more than what I say, and those are very easy to misinterpret or overinterpret. And she says things... but it's not actually what she means. By us writing/typing things out, we're able to communicate without stray signals creating noise.

▲ a day ago | parent | prev [-]
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▲walthamstow a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was surprised to find after using dictation heavily all year that I actually talk a load of rubbish when I'm speaking, using all kinds of cliches and fillers and saying way more than was needed.

▲achandra03 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, I feel very similar. Maybe it's just that my verbal intelligence is lower than average but it feels that the signal to noise ratio is much lower when I speak off the cuff vs when I type.

▲dr_hooo a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Same experience. Faster, but also much more filler.

▲cogythea a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The bit before your quote was

> with many people

Not everyone. I, at least, definitely overthink what I type, and while I end up with nice-ish sentences in my prompts it takes a lot longer than a train of thought that the AI parses correctly most of the time anyway.

▲achandra03 a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, of course I wasn't trying to speak for everyone. Just my personal experience :)

▲ a day ago | parent | prev [-]
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▲1shooner a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But what you're calling 'talking things out' I consider to be forming thoughts. I want to do that myself upstream of the LLM. I don't want to pay per token for my half-baked stream of consciousness.

▲briandw a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm dyslexic and while I can type fairly quickly it's always a struggle to get the spelling and typing mistakes fixed. Talking is a much more natural way to express myself. The frustration of not being able to spell the word that I want doesn't exist. Mis-transcription errors are of course an issue, but those are getting fewer and fewer.

▲kqp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, speech is probably bottlenecked by speed of thought, not making the sounds. I recall some study showing that data rate is pretty consistent between languages, despite wpm varying significantly due to language verbosity. You can try it yourself: try to quickly repeat “one two three four five” then try to read a paragraph out loud as quickly as you can, I bet you can feel the first strain your muscles and the second your brain, and I bet the first blows your typing wpm out of the water.

▲heurist a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hard to paste in 2k words of context when you're talking. I don't think voice is the solution for most people who need to communicate heavily with AI.

▲uhutiik a day ago | parent [-]

[dead]

▲chicagobuss a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I try talking for prompting my coding agents, I'm always severely disappointed with the specificity of the prompt. It's just much easier for me to "talk about" coding specifics with a keyboard than it is for me to speak about them, for some reason.

I suspect this has to do with the nature of the work you're doing; I dunno, just count me firmly in the camp of people who only rarely feel like I can express a thought sufficiently for coding agents with their voice.

▲sadilek a day ago | parent [-]

I guess it depends on how close to the code you want to work. I find that I lately talk only about the features and UX and can leave the coding details completely to the agent. That might not work in every project, but I suspect it might work more often than people think because it's hard to adapt to the quickly increasing capabilities of LLMs.

I think a good habit is: Try to make the agent fail at least once a week with a too ambitious request. This got surprisingly hard lately :)

▲LorenPechtel a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, we have a lot of experience with typing while our eyes and mind are occupied elsewhere. But I've noticed the years have slowed my typing.