Without Writing, You're Just a Finite Automaton
Writing as a Thinking Tool
Murat Buffalo argues that writing is not a record of thinking but the thinking itself. Drawing on Manuel Blum's comparison of finite automata to Turing machines — the only difference being paper and pencil — he treats prose as out-of-core execution for the mind. He offers five rules: draft messily, edit ruthlessly, write plainly, write for yourself, and put it on the calendar. In the LLM era, he warns, a polished six-pager no longer proves anyone thought.
If you think without writing, you only think you're thinking.
- billypilgrim
When I had started my PhD, I thought the writing part of a paper was just the last thing I needed to do to summarize my results, like a boring epilogue to the more exciting science. What surprised me was how much of the scientific process relied on my ability to convey my ideas to someone else. And to be able to do that you need clarity of mind, you need to have worked through multiple drafts to be able to get to your point as efficiently and clearly as possible. So many times I only discovered what I was actually researching during the writing part.
The problem with AI writing is that it makes people believe that writing is just writing and not a tool for thinking very deeply about the topic you are writing about. I am not completely opposed to AI assisted writing, but if I see AI writing, it’s telling me that the author tried to take a shortcut in their own thinking and it’s a good heuristic that the ideas will not be thought through enough to warrant my complete attention.
- devin
Walter J. Ong wrote an essay a good long awhile ago entitled "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought"[1] which is worth reading on this topic.
[1]: https://twinada.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/708...
- lilerjee
Writing code (Programming) is a thinking tool too.
When you are writing code manually, actually you are thinking about what you are doing, what you will build actually, what are your or users' real requirements, etc.
- luisalima
For me, writing is also a thinking tool, that is why I don't use AI to write. But using AI to generate ideas for writing? All the time :D (That way, I don't need to wait for that inspiration). I like the idea of scheduling it though!
- drewbeck
This is true for designing, too. I see a lot of people saying Figma is dead because you can prototype directly; for novel UX problems the act of designing — of putting ideas together, assembling a component, even getting good data into a design — is where a lot of my thinking and insights develop. The brain work plus the craft work, the tight loop between thinking and creating is so critical for me and I haven’t found nearly the same feeling when prompting.
In writing and designing I think we often have a thought-feeling first: something inchoate that we can’t quite articulate yet. Getting directly to the medium itself — text or frames and layouts — is how we give shape to that feeling and turn it into a concept, insight or design.
- hoppp
Most of my projects are born out of scribbles on paper, system diagrams with boxes and little arrows to try to describe the system I want to build or my thought process written down like in this post.
When I get it on paper and everything feels right I start creating the codebase but I have to get it down first, feels like I remember it more after I save my thoughts to external paper storage.
- FinnLobsien
One of the biggest thing we lose as we replace workflows with AI are the ancillary benefits of the process of writing (prose or code), design, or anything else.
You may produce an acceptable result faster with AI, but the deep understanding, questioning your own assumptions, and correcting your own errors only come from the actual writing process.
And these are not nice to haves because that cognitive context drives all downstream work.
- kmstout
"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is."
--Richard Guindon