⚡ The software engineers' bottleneck is information intake. How to read and process information faster
Engineers struggling with information overload? This guide shows how AI revolutionizes reading, helping you process docs & code 10x faster for deeper understanding. 🎁 Resource inside
Most software engineers are bottlenecked not by coding, but by how fast they process information
What if you could read 10x faster without sacrificing understanding?
I was already focusing on this before LLMs came into play. And now, I found ways to put it all together:
⭐ In this post you'll learn:
How AI can speed up your reading and comprehension process.
Why faster input translates into faster output and faster career growth.
How to actively use AI to interact with the content, making learning deeper and more efficient.
Practical workflows to integrate AI-powered reading into your daily routine.
🎁 A prompt to start applying this right now to your code reviews
(like this 👇)
⚡ Faster input = Faster output = Faster career
Everything you want, like promotions and making better decisions, starts with faster comprehension.
As a software engineer, reading isn't just a task; it's a core part of your job. The huge volume of technical documentation, code reviews, emails, and project updates can overwhelm anyone. I realized that feeding an LLM all relevant docs about a project helped me move super fast. That’s because understanding all the information in a fraction of the time directly affects your ability to execute quickly.
In engineer’s lingo:
Humans read linearly, from start to end → O(n)
LLMs read the contents of a doc indexed, accessing faster the content you need → O(log n) (yes, I excluded the indexing complexity becuse that isn’t a cost for us but for big tech companies)
Understanding how much you actually read in a day is crucial. You digest technical docs, PRs, RFCs, internal wikis, and more. We need to grasp new concepts while staying updated on project statuses, communication, and research. But this process takes time. For code reviews, I use a checklist + prompt to go faster. That’s where AI comes in, speed reading isn’t just about reading faster; it’s about understanding more, more quickly.
Faster comprehension translates into faster career growth. You’ll ramp up on projects faster, make better decisions, and ultimately move through your career progression more efficiently. Traditional speed reading techniques are ineffective when dealing with technical content. Instead, AI amplifies your speed and comprehension, making it a necessary tool for every engineer. The ability to understand complex material quickly isn't just a competitive edge, it's a career necessity.
🤖 Use AI to remove friction from the way you read
Speed reading with AI augments how you read, not just what you read.
I learned speed reading before all this AI hype.
Speed reading with AI isn’t only about reading faster, it's about learning not only from the text in front of you but from the knowledge of the LLM and doing additional searches. AI helps you consume information in ways traditional methods can’t. For instance, instead of subvocalizing each word in a document…