To go even more meta, there is an analogy I'm trying to make right now in which I am visualizing a road and thinking about how describing the road relates to the process of writing. In my mind's eye, I can see the full length of the road and all of its contours but I can't actually describe the individual stretches of the road coherently without enumerating them. Something similar happens with writing. I can visualize what I want to say far beyond the next word, but it's true that the actual process of writing goes word to word, much like how the process of token selection is described for an LLM. The question is whether the LLM has an analogous conception of where it is going. Going back to the process above, sometimes I know where I am going and haven't yet figured out how to articulate it yet. It is through the process of writing that I am able to articulate that thought. But the thought preceded my articulation of it. I don't know to what extent LLMs have coherent thoughts that they are articulating or if that even makes sense for the type of intelligence they project. My suspicion is that they don't have additional sensory inputs beyond language that give thoughts the immaterial shape that then is expressed in language. Without that, I am skeptical that they will truly get beyond regurgitating and/or remixing what has already been fed to them textually. That doesn't diminish how amazing they are, but I am somewhat more in the Brooks/Knuth camp that they are impressive and surprising, but there is something that ultimately leaves me a bit cold about them.
Not to trivialise the interesting point you’re making, but do you never write with an outline? Write bullets for the big points you want to touch, then go back and flesh out the details?
Having learned another language, the moment you start to feel “fluent” is when you start speaking first in the 2nd language and aren’t using your first language as an intermediate step to translate to your 2nd language.