{
  "path": "/posts/2025/on-writing-speaking-and-thinking/index",
  "site": "at://did:plc:mracrip6qu3vw46nbewg44sm/site.standard.publication/self",
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "title": "On Writing, Speaking and Thinking",
  "updatedAt": "2025-12-02T21:35:45.000Z",
  "publishedAt": "2025-12-02T21:35:45.000Z",
  "textContent": "Have you ever observed someone try and demonstrate how they use a coding agent?\nThe presenter will usually introduce the concept of an agent, discuss the idea of a software harness wrapping a language model, and then will show an example of how it works.\n\nWhen they make the transition from explaining to demonstrating, a visceral change occurs.\nThey begin dictating what they are typing into the agent chat window.\n\n> Create a React, Typescript application, using the Tailwind CSS framework ...\n\nUsually monotone.\nUsually with a slower cadence than their natural speaking speed.\nUsually completely different from how they were previously addressing the audience.\n\nThe communication style is completely different.\n\nFrequently witnessing this shift in these presentations was what first gave me more insight into the differences between writing and speaking, and why I think I better understand this idea now, after being introduced to it by Paul Graham.\n\nThe tension of writing while speaking\n\nThe reason I believe it is awkward to type a prompt to an agent while presenting is because you're stretching your mental bandwidth trying to perform two different activities at once.\nOn one side, you're presenting or performing.\nYou're trying to deliver certain material to an audience that they can follow and understand.\nYou're thinking about your tone, pacing, and ensuring you've mentioned all your talking points.\n\nOn the other, you're attempting to craft a specific thought.\nBecause you're putting words to an idea, you now need to pick the words.\nYour mind shifts to considering which words you should choose.\n\nIt seems this mental shift also causes most people to downshift in speed.\nFrom what I have observed, it seems\n\n1. most people type more slowly than they speak\n2. putting words on a \"page\" invokes an inner critic in a way that is less common while speaking\n\nBut the disconnect is actually deeper than this.\n\nAs a presenter, you already know what you're going to say, and the change in speed is due to typing more slowly than you speak.\nIf you've preemptively come up with your prompt, writing it or pasting it into the agent is not really representative of the process you followed to create that prompt.\n\nWitnessing either feels unnatural and confusing to an audience member.\nYou are showing the final product of your thinking process, not the process itself.\n\nA better version of this demo would be building an under-prescribed idea in real time and working through the ambiguities and clarifications required to get a functional result.\n\nEffectively using an agent to help you accomplish tasks requires you to participate in the thinking process.\n\nThinking is refining unstructured ideas\n\nWriting lets you spend time refining and organizing unstructured thoughts.\nWe can think of unstructured thoughts as stream of consciousness.\nThe type of things you say as a response in conversation or doing morning pages, where you just write and don't edit or delete anything.\n\nThe words and ideas that come from these processes often contain the raw material you might use to refine your thoughts, but they are scattered and fuzzy, lacking coherence and consistency.\nIf want to clearly communicate an idea, you need to refine these.\n\nAnd how do you do that?\nYou put them into words then edit and structure them.\n\nThe writing process brings clarity to thought.\nWriting is thinking.\n\nWhy speaking isn't really thinking\n\nThink of a time you were having a debate and felt like someone said something you didn't quite have a good response to.\nYou felt unprepared and maybe gave an unconvincing response or maybe tried to change the subject to deflect from that fact.\n\nLater, you probably thought of a response that would have been better, you just hadn't thought of it in the moment.\n\nSpeaking is linear.\n\nIf you want to go revisit something you've already said, you must pivot a conversation back to an earlier point.\nTo reopen, revise, or revisit a matter that seemed settled.\nTo bring your conversation partner or audience along to ensure they are following you through the change in topic.\n\nNon-linearity in speaking is an illusion.\nYou are always appending words to the transcript of time.\n\nWhen speaking, you're confined to the best you can do in the moment, given the constraints.\nIf you can't think of the perfect word, you might substitute a passable replacement.\nYou might use several words to describe your idea.\nYou likely won't pause in silence while you think of the right word.\n\nSpeaking uses mental bandwidth you might have allocated to thinking.\nWhen you start saying words, you only have so much time before you need to say other words.\nThat is just how speaking works.\nYou're freestyling your abstract thoughts.\nIt's hard to say things exactly as you want given these constraints.\n\nIf you need to communicate yourself clearly through speech, you probably will prepare and practice beforehand.\nYou'll structure and organize your thoughts.\nYou will consider your argument, counterarguments, and your audience.\nWhen you speak your ideas, you will have already done most of your thinking and can focus on delivery.\n\nIn conversation, you never quite know what your conversation partner will say.\nYou spend mental bandwidth listening and processing what the other person is saying.\nWhen it's your turn to speak, you will have just finished hearing the thoughts of your partner and then you need to verbalize your own thoughts to respond.\n\nHow can you listen, think, and figure out what you're going to say all at once?\n\nAt best, your mental bandwidth is split.\nIn practice, you are reacting.\nWith practice and the preparation of experience, you respond coherently and clearly.\nBut it's hard to imagine doing your best thinking under such tight mental constraints.\n\nWriting is nonlinear\n\nYour best idea is unlikely to be your first idea.\nYour clearest thought is unlikely to be your first.\n\nIt's challenging and effortful to think things through.\nIt's often complicated, requires research, presents tradeoffs.\nMost things are complicated if you take the time to look at them closely.\n\nWriting is a better fit than speaking for thinking because writing allows for nonlinear interaction with ideas.\nWith thoughts laid out in words, you can fluidly jump between paragraphs, reorder how concepts are introduced, swoop in and change a single word or phrase for clarity.\n\nYou can sit with your work, take breaks when you're tired, and return when you are inspired.\nYou can evolve and define your ideas.\nYou think.\n\nWriting changes your ideas\n\nWriting is thinking because when you write about something, your ideas change with the writing.\nYou are a slightly different person at the end of writing a work than you were before.\n\nWriting needs to be focused, in part, to ensure you can actually stop writing.\nTo provide a reasonable spot to conclude work.\n\nThe writing that feels most worthwhile leaves me with as many new questions as answers.\n\nYet this always means a writer is cursed to spend forever chasing their tail, writing to think, writing to think.\n\nWriting and agents\n\nWhen working with agents, the most common difficulty I hear when someone feels they are not having success is that the agent is failing to do what they want it to do.\nTypically, this challenge results from not having done the necessary thinking about what is to be done.\n\nKnowing what you want is the only way to collaborate successfully with a coding agent.\nThese tools are trained to be instruction following.\nIn a void of instructions, they often make median, flavorless decisions.\nIn a void of context, they attempt to fill in the gaps as best they can.\n\nContext engineering (a topic worthy of its own post) is a downstream application of knowing what you want.\n\nYou can only begin to know what you want by thinking about what it is you need to accomplish.\n\nYou write to do this thinking.\nAs you write more, you think more and refine your approach.\n\nSo if you are struggling getting a coding agent to do what you want, think about what it is that you want to accomplish.\nWrite it down.\n\nOnce you're finished, you will have done your thinking and you will have written your prompt as well.",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.danielcorin.com/posts/2025/on-writing-speaking-and-thinking/index"
}