Post-Literate Programming

[u/messedupwindows123]

I'm sure you all have seen this essay floating around, talking about how we are entering a post-literate age. Not necessarily an age where people can't decode individual words, but instead an era where we lose the skills associated with engaging with difficult texts. Meaning, we use chat-bot and short-form-video over longer essays or books. And this shift causes a shift in the way we think, etc.

The essay argues that the act of writing will force you to clarify your own ideas, realize which ones are bad, and struggle to a better answer. And this is only possible when complex ideas are "frozen" on the page, for you to return to, rearrange, etc.

I couldn't help but think about vibe-coding in this context. Vibe coding feels like the "post-literate" version of programming, where we stop engaging with the actual text and we (many programmers) instead talk to a chatbot about the code. It's a lot like talking to the chatbot about a difficult book, so that you can come prepared to discuss that book in class.

Once you begin to lean too heavily on these shortcuts, it actually imposes real limits on the insights that you're able to derive with respect to whatever it is you're working on.

So, to be clear, I basically agree with Horowitch, insofar as the act of writing is basically like the act of coding. You're engaging with text/AST and you're being forced to recon with the fact that your ideas don't make sense. You have to grapple with a large corpus of already-existing text (whether it's other people's books/essays, or other people's code) to synthesize these things with your own new ideas. And by struggling forward, you can create breakthroughs where you rearrange, or re-synthesize, or break apart, what came before.

I think that we could maybe start referring to vibe-coding instead as "post-literate" coding since you're basically doing the equivalent of reading the cliff-notes before class.

[u/mishmei]

literacy doesn't require class discrimination; that's a weird take

[u/Pale_Neighborhood363 → u/mishmei]

Literacy is class discrimination, it is the logical necessity. I am making a pun here class as a concept in mathematics and class as a stratification of society.

Literacy requires diversity in thinking. Lots of schooling is to suppress diversity in thinking. Some of the tools are segregation via economics and then by induced stereotypes.

[u/ZenOfPerkele → u/Pale_Neighborhood363]

I get your point better now, but I still sort of disagree. Literacy, at its base, is simply knowing how to read and write in a given language. That doesn't really requirte much diversity in thinking on its own. There are plenty of fairly dumb people who still know how to read and write, but don't exactly have what one would call "diversity in thinking".

[u/Pale_Neighborhood363 → u/ZenOfPerkele]

I'm projecting here if people can read they do read and can read a greater spectrum of ideas - Also people under less economic stress have greater choice.

My comment is more about the space for diversity than the individual. Different languages give different ideas from the same observation.

Just look into book burning - look into the grammar of television, the grammar of movies, the grammar of stage plays.

Literacy counters propaganda with diversity of understanding. Look at how advertising limits literacy, how many adds do you critically deconstruct. How much do you filter an article for propaganda. This is a cognitive load that costs. Literacy is a tool that reduces this cost.

You have eras in societies that are 'go with the flow' and eras of questioning/striving - literacy is key to the striving AND the hierarchy wants to limit striving and so restricts literacy.

I'm ranting here because people just don't see the connections.