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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#101

Post by ubermonkey »

e40 wrote: post #86
shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

Paralleling Linux and MacOS is pretty simple, but the last time I tried to make the same config work properly in Windows it was a nightmare b/c of the path issues.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#102

Post by iLemming »

shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible

I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types, formats, CLI and web tools, protocols, paradigms, OSS and proprietary apps.

That means I have to constantly adapt, my control plane has to keep up with the flux. Automation is key - you must develop a mentality for that - every little annoyance can be and shall be automated. That is an endless, non-stop transformation of my workflow - continuous maintenance of my tooling. But that is not some toilsome, reactive maintenance.

Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home.

Emacs is the cook's home kitchen. I'd say there are two kinds of maintenance: reactive (fixing breakage, keeping up with churn) versus generative (shaping tools to match your evolving understanding). Programmers instinctively dislike the first and should be drawn to the second. Emacs is almost uniquely suited to generative maintenance because the tool and the work share the same substrate.

I get your complaint about Emacs specifically, it's a common: "too much work to set up", which usually means: "I don't want to invest before I get value", which honestly is not wise, strategic thinking. Treating Emacs as the universal tool for minimizing total maintenance burden over a career, over a lifetime is.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#103

Post by tptacek »

dang wrote: post #55

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…

There's something about this whole situation that rhymes with the issue of LLM-generated prose. It's not that GPT 5.5 writes bad prose (I mean, it doesn't write good prose, but it's not awful). It's that once I pick up on the text being GPT 5.5's, my brain switches into a mode where it starts reminding me "this is just GPT output, you could just ask GPT 5.5 these questions yourself, and get answers better tailored to what you want to know". Why am I reading this one particular artifact of a conversation with the LLM? Once I know what the conversation is about, I can just have a better one myself.

Same deal with a lot of this software. I guess there's some "taste" to it, but mostly what you care about are the ideas and the "recipe".

Also, you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#104

Post by shaokind »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #73
shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that. So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

Less about the capabilities of LLM software, but more about my willingness to spend time to deploy them, debug them, etc.

I don't want to spend time on dealing with change. Hence why I'd rather purchase tools, where I pay for the developer to a) prepare for any maintenance, and b) will perform the maintenance needed.

(Of course, the maintainability of software with current generation LLMs depends a lot on how well your architecture them. I've got pure vibe coded slop, that can be very difficult to wrangle.)

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#105

Post by tptacek »

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim:

* Podcast apps

* Music listening apps

* Feed readers

* Bluesky clients

* Note-taking apps

* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps

* Chat and instant messaging

* Time trackers

* Recipe managers

These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.

Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#106

Post by dang »

tptacek wrote: post #103
dang wrote: post #55

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…

There's something about this whole situation that rhymes with the issue of LLM-generated prose. It's not that GPT 5.5 writes bad prose (I mean, it doesn't write good prose, but it's not awful). It's that once I pick up on the text being GPT 5.5's, my brain switches into a mode where it starts reminding me "this is just GPT output, you could just ask GPT 5.5 these questions yourself, and get answers better tailored to…

Those are great points and it leads right back to the solipsism thing. Also, you snuck a "It's not that X, it's that Y." in there. Nice.

> you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread

It wouldn't stop people from feeding them into the Show HN stream, which is the problem. If we had a good enough way to tell them apart, we could factor them into two streams, but we don't yet.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#107

Post by peacebeard »

iLemming wrote: post #102
shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types…

To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#108

Post by melonpan7 »

The barrier to entry for writing personalized software is lower, but you still need expertise for instruction and maintenance.

I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#109

Post by skydhash »

jr_isidore wrote: post #72
skydhash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really the same. Emacs focus a lot on compatibility and common modules (even if there may be some different takes on those common things). So you got big systems like helm, consul, ivy, company,… and the. everyone building on top. Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emac…

OP is trying to say Home Depot let normies do their own small repairs, and you're protesting saying "No, no, that's not how we pros do it."

Normies can do their own repairs when they want and how they want. But I was just pointing out a difference in behavior, not the true way of doing.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#110

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

melonpan7 wrote: post #108

The barrier to entry for writing personalized software is lower, but you still need expertise for instruction and maintenance. I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.

If you were building it for yourself would you ever chose Electron?
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