The discussion focuses on creating a program to write a specified number of characters to a file and then read them back. The initial code snippet includes opening a file for writing with `fopen`, using `fprintf` to write the character 'a' ten times, and then closing the file. For reading, the code suggests using `fopen` again with the "r" mode but lacks complete implementation details. Key functions highlighted for file operations include `fopen`, `fclose`, `fgetc`, and `printf`. To count characters in the file, a loop with `fgetc` can be employed until EOF is reached, incrementing a counter. The discussion also references a tutorial for further guidance on file I/O in C programming, emphasizing the importance of understanding the correct usage of these standard library functions.