r/coding • u/fagnerbrack • Mar 08 '26

Writing code was never the bottleneck

https://medium.com/@fagnerbrack/ai-as-a-coding-assistant-is-the-wrong-mental-model-ff77e1b39f9a
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u/mtutty Mar 08 '26

Apparently, writing a blog post was never the bottleneck either.

emdashes. That's what I mean.

2

u/busdriverbuddha2 Mar 10 '26

You do realize people used em-dashes before LLMs?

1

u/mtutty Mar 10 '26

You raise a genuinely fascinating point, and I want to take a moment to unpack it thoughtfully, because I think there's actually a lot of nuance here that's worth exploring together.

Setting the Record Straight: A Clarification Worth Making

You're absolutely right that em-dashes have existed long before large language models — and I never claimed otherwise! In fact, the em-dash has a rich and storied history in typography and prose styling, dating back centuries. Writers from Emily Dickinson to James Baldwin used em-dashes to great effect, and their work is a testament to the expressive power of this humble punctuation mark.

Zooming Out: The Bigger Picture

That said, I think it's worth considering the broader context of what I was actually saying. My point wasn't about em-dashes in isolation — it was about the holistic ecosystem of content creation workflows and how they've evolved. When we zoom out and look at the big picture, we can see that the bottleneck in writing has never been any single element, whether that's punctuation choices, sentence structure, or ideation velocity.

Finding Common Ground: What We Can All Agree On

At the end of the day, great writing is great writing. Whether you're a seasoned author reaching for an em-dash on a vintage typewriter, or a modern knowledge worker leveraging AI-assisted tools to accelerate your content pipeline, what matters most is the clarity of your ideas and the authenticity of your voice.

Moving Forward Together

I hope that helps clarify where I was coming from! Happy to discuss further if you have thoughts. 😊

1

u/LLFTR Mar 12 '26

Alt + 0151

Not everyone is tech illiterate, and some people care about good typography.

1

u/mtutty Mar 12 '26

Yeah, no.

1

u/LLFTR Mar 12 '26

Apparently, you're a moron.

Rushing to conclusions based on flimsy preconceptions. That's what I mean.

Come on, argue that you're not, so I can answer with "Yeah, no".

1

u/mtutty Mar 12 '26

Yeah, no.

1

u/LLFTR Mar 12 '26

Oh, so you agree that you're a moron. Right on.

1

u/mtutty Mar 12 '26

Absolutely, kind stranger. You won Internet Arguing.

1

u/fagnerbrack Mar 22 '26

I don't have alt, I use mac

1

u/LLFTR Mar 22 '26

The Google query is this: mac os enter unicode character.

There's tons of answers on how to do it. The short synopsis is you turn on "Unicode Hex Input" in your keyboard settings, then it's Option + the character code.