alt Hacker NewsMost 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 :)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.