The Post-Literate Engineer - Joe Reis
Joe Reis
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The Post-Literate Engineer<br>The Weekend Windup #40 - Cool reads, events, links, and more
Joe Reis<br>Aug 02, 2026
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The Post-Literate Engineer
Idiocracy is a wonderful documentary about the present moment<br>I’ve read my whole life, being jokingly called “a book with legs sticking out the bottom,” to borrow a phrase from Charlie Munger (also a big bookworm). If I’m not working, I most likely have a book glued to my face (reading is working too, I guess). Every week, I still get through a book or two, plus a pile of dozens of articles on my iPad. My favorite thing in the morning is to spin bike on my Kaiser M3i and read on my iPad for an hour or so. But reading feels different than it did in the past. I used to knock out a 300-page book in a day. I still can, but I’m time and attention-starved, and I notice reading just takes more deliberate effort now.<br>I’m sitting here holding the print edition of The Atlantic (yes, an actual physical magazine, because apparently I’m fancy like that) reading a piece called “The Age of Reading Is Over.“ It’s about whether civilization survives the post-literate era. It’s also about eleven pages long, which might be the funniest and most ironic part of the whole thing.<br>Marshall McLuhan called this in the 1960s. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he argued that the printing press didn’t just give us books. It rewired how humans think: linear thought, individual authorship, sequential arguments, mass-producing information. The whole idea of the literate, rational person came out of that world. When you think of a “person of letters,” the image of a bookwork comes to mind. McLuhan figured electronic media like TV (new back then) would start reversing it: culture getting more immediate, visual, fragmented, oral, collective. He wasn’t saying reading or writing would disappear. He was saying literacy would stop being the operating system of society.<br>I think we’re watching that happen right now. The other day at the gym, I saw a woman with a copy of Atomic Habits (one of the best-selling books of all time) next to her. I was going to ask her what she thought of the book, but I noticed she never once picked it up, and instead spent her time between workouts scrolling TikTok. I joke the universal posture of humans is our heads down, staring at screens.<br>By nearly every account, deep reading of long-form is dying. Strangely, we’re not information-poor. If anything, we’re drowning in more information than ever - short videos, podcasts (like mine, hi), social feeds, AI convos and summaries. What’s different now is the sheer constancy of the competition for your attention.<br>So what does any of this have to do with engineering?<br>A lot, actually. We are entering the age of the post-literate engineer.<br>Generating Stuff Is Cheap. Judgment Is Scarce
For most of our industry’s history, you had to be literate in the thing you were making. Read code to write code. Understand SQL to write a real query, and ideally understand it well enough to read the query plan. Reason through a schema before you built one. Comprehend how various parts of architecture work together.<br>I see this breaking down, where our ability to produce stuff and comprehend it is diverging. Now, an engineer can generate code, pipelines, tests, docs, infrastructure, schemas, and whole architecture diagrams in minutes. Without being able to explain or evaluate a single piece of it. You’ve seen this. I’ve seen this. We do it all day. The assumption is “I can produce this, therefore I understand it.”<br>This is not an argument against AI-assisted engineering (I did warn about this last year in my talks on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of AI Slopware). AI is real leverage for a strong engineer, in the way power tools are real leverage for a skilled carpenter.<br>There’s also false leverage in the hands of someone who’s unskilled, with AI tools creating a bigger blast radius with no corresponding increase in understanding. Last night I was talking with someone about people at his company using AI to create forecasts, but without understanding basic stuff like backtesting the results of the forecast. Not good. This plays out in various ways daily, where we have a mass Dunning-Kruger delusion of productivity, at the expense of understanding what the hell we’re doing.<br>Producing almost any technical artifact like code, a data model, etc now costs almost nothing. Maybe a few minutes and some tokens. Evaluating and...