Writing Is Closer to Thought Than Code

Basically I think he is at the top of the mountain for the old way of doing things. He’s got tons of skills and tons of commands that he encourages people to run manually. Having a human in the loop is a major theme for him, which I think is now an anti-pattern.

But his central idea lately has been that the most important thing in a development project is the code itself. That specs are useful and everything, but the code itself is the main artifact. The source of truth for everything.1

I disagree strongly. I think the articulation of what you’re building, and why, is far more important. Basically, the idea. Your intent.

I think the most important thing in any project you’re building with AI (and even without it), from building a web app, to starting a business, to managing a federation of planets, is how completely and accurately you articulate exactly what you want.

To be clear, I’m not saying you need a perfect, crystallized articulation before you start. Nobody has that. We’re human, and what we want gets clearer as we build. My argument is about where that iteration happens: inside the articulation of the ideal state, not in circles around the code. And there are two loops, not one. Your intent and the writing go back and forth as you figure out what you actually want, and the writing and the implementation go back and forth as you build.

I think most of the problems we see with AI in 2026 are misattributed. AI is extraordinary at execution. It’s getting unbelievably great at doing what we ask it to do. More and more of the problems at this point are it executing the job perfectly, and having the result be different than what was in our mind.

But this is a communication problem. It’s an articulation problem.

Authors have this same problem. It’s commonly called Writer’s Blindness. It’s where you think you’re perfectly capturing what’s in your brain, but you’re not. And so the receiver, or the reader, ends up missing information or getting a completely different review than the author intended.

The problem with Matt’s position is that he thinks code is authoritative. It’s actually an abstraction, the same way a painting is an abstraction of what the painter was wanting to convey. It’s an execution. A facsimile. A representation.

But there’s a higher form of this, and that’s writing. And images.

Writing is the closest thing we have to human thought. As I like to tell people all the time, for me writing IS thinking. It’s the closest thing we have, by a wide margin.