Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

Some vaguely related research: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

If you compare different languages, the speed people tend to speak (measured in syllables per second) varies significantly. However, the number of possible syllables also varies significantly. Once you account for that, the speed of speaking in terms of information is fairly consistent across languages.

I'm not aware of any specific research directly on point to what the author of the posted blog describes. But his hypothesis that having a consistent speaker reduces the cognitive overhead of decoding seems to be part of the story.

However, we would expect a similar effect in people who read, as the writing is also highly standardized. However, I've generally seen silent reading speads for English estimated at around 250. Getting up to 800 WPM puts you well within the realm of speed reading territory.

The relatively high structure of code and rote emails probably helps too.

ok, so you can understand the words at 800wpm...can you really comprehend what's being said? When I listen to youtube videos at 2x speed I can usually pick apart all the words just fine but I often have to slow it down to properly process the meaning behind those words.

I worked with a developer briefly who would produce code at an extremely high speed (this was before LLMs) and I've observed them write 50% of the code for two projects in the matter of a few days.

While I never got around to asking them how they coded so fast, this was probably one of the tools in their arsenal.

This is really interesting. I wonder–would it be possible to listen to an audiobook or PDF at 800 wpm once one learns how to understand the screenreader "language"? Presumably the cognitive load would get heavy if the content were a stream of unstructured prose as opposed to code.

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