It’s more complicated than that I think. You don’t spend much time typing, but how much does the time you spend (and the cognitive load of) typing deconstruct the mental architecture you’ve created to solve a problem?

This is at the core of why vim/others are still so popular. The micro-gains in typing efficiency translate to much more efficient problem solving because you don’t “lose your place” within your mental process. I think the same would extend to cursorless.

I find typing can be helpful. I think more about certain aspects of the problem as I type, so I often discover edge cases I hadn't thought about or potential performance pitfalls.

I guess it's a bit like navigating using only the map in the war room vs navigating on the ground without a map. The ideal route comes through a combination of both, and typing allows for the latter point of view.

Though after typing for a while, I'll take a step back and think about the overall solution again, going over it in my mind. Then back to typing.

That said, I gotta have a responsive editor.

And TDD is bad because it requires too much of typing /sarcasm

TDD is bad because it introduces distracting busywork. The actual typing isn't the actual problem.

In terms of just typing, I could probably produce something like 50,000 lines of code in a 40 hour work week in a moderately verbose programming language. In practice I'll probably crank out somewhere between 1000-5000.

It's the thinking that is slow. It's made even slower by adding additional tasks and context switching.

The average professional software engineer produces around 10 LOC per day.

I admit this a weird edge case, but a few years ago I fractured my left elbow and could only use one hand. When typing one handed, typing speed was a bottleneck.