We lost reading. In the advent of GenAI we are all worried about losing the writing. Software developers write less code than ever. Writers have polished drafts since the very inception of a new idea. Everybody is talking about Generative AI models writing slop communications, garbage code or stupid songs.
But I am afraid that we have already lost reading, the same way we lost dancing during Covid. We recovered dancing a few months after lockdowns ended, but it will never be the same as in the pre-Covid era. Not just because Covid changed us, but because people are now more worried about recording events than fully living them. And younger generations carry the extra weight of being recorded while dancing, or doing whatever you do when you don’t control who is capturing the moment.
Times are changing constantly, and that is not bad per se, but you always have this yearning of having lost something from the past. My yearning lately is reading with pause and ease. I still do it at night when I read, mostly fiction these days. But I am growing tired of reading AI-generated plans and deep research pieces. They feel soulless, as Fabien Girardin describes in Writing With Probabilistic Machines, an “illusion of maturity” that skips the deeper thinking.
Vibe Coding Agentic Engineering Loop Engineering is changing how we build products. We hardly read code anymore, but we are supposed to read the brainstorms and plans the latest AI agent has written for us. Context Engineering is now our main job, and reading what the machine produces is the only way to know if it fits our needs.
I enjoy having this new partner who does the heavy lifting for me, fighting Python dependencies, writing tests. I even enjoy when it poses me questions to improve specs together. But I am growing weary of these walls of text machines keep generating. AI labs propose using HTML instead of Markdown, as it might be easier for us humans to digest.
Let’s not fool ourselves. No matter the format, all these texts are generated for other machines to read. Not for us. That is why I really think we lost reading. My hope is that we will need a thousand lives before we run out of high-quality human-generated texts before books themselves get dumber.