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I think computer/smartphone usage has been changing that latent space for quite some time. People have been talking about "character amnesia" since 2010.

Sort of, but the amnesia typically applies to writing characters, rather than reading them.

Pinyin is also the main way people input Chinese into computers, so it's rather important in that regard.

I've been taking Chinese lessons for a number of years, and my teacher described her son as learning characters via pinyin. But it's quite possible (even likely) that the common ones don't require pinyin, and/or that I misunderstood how it's used. Nevertheless, even if I pushed the analogy a bit, I still think this might happen as a bridge between learning to code and agentic coding.