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Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#21

Post by MantisShrimp90 »

(Neo)vim is setup wonderfully for this era. Im with Justin on the take that neovim can replace tmux soon literally all that is left is being able to restart terminal sessions on restart (which is even set as a goal for summer of code).

Neovim can already have all the agents running in different terminal buffers or there are plugins popping up every day to have deep integrations with your favorite or we even have some interesting harnesses that are unique to neovim like sidekick.

As always, the ability to compose small tools and edit any file allow neovim to stay relevant and more powerful than ever in my opinion while not forcing workflow changes like the others

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#22

Post by redlewel »

How are you a heavy vim user if you wonder if vim makes sense with ai? There are so many things to do outside of writing code that vim is used for.

Also neovim + claude code + open terminal pane in tmux is the goated combo anyway. Especially more lately you need to understand the code you are writing if you want to do anything important in software, and the best way to do that is neovim :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#23

Post by mrweasel »

ActionHank wrote: post #3

You're not looking at the code?

I'd even go so far at to say that if you're not writing the code yourself, you probably need to look at it even more than previously.

Even before AI most of us read way more code than we wrote, that should still hold true.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#24

Post by linsomniac »

mtklein wrote: post #4

On about day 2 of using Fable I realized that the .vimrc I'd been maintaining for 15-20 years would probably never change again. With Opus I still feel like I'm pair coding and want to get in there and make some changes myself, but working with Fable (even Fable managing Opus agents) had me in a completely different mindset, one where I realized I would just be getting in the way.

A couple years ago I decided to stop maintaining a .vimrc (after ~35 years), and started using LunarVim and later AstroVim with as few customizations as I could live with.

But then around 2 months ago I decided to switch to NixOS and there wasn't a Nix way I could find to use Astro. So I had Opus build me a vim setup for NixOS that included the batteries I wanted in my setup. I gave it a paragraph description and it built something that has been a joy to use.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#25

Post by anonymid »

I wrote my own neovim AI harnesshttps://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim

And wrote about my thoughts on the relevance of nvim here https://dlants.me/ai-whiplash.html

It's been many months, and I thoroughly prefer my harness inside of nvim as my day to day development environment. Using Claude code or cursor makes me feel very removed from the code.

Exploring code, gathering context and tweaking prompts/giving guidance to the agent are very much enhanced by neovim.

The biggest boon has been the fact that agents make customizing neovim a lot easier. Writing new bindings, config, and even building novel plugins.

Here's a few that I built that fit into my workflow:

- a tool for reviewing commits / branches / wip. https://github.com/dlants/glean

- an iterative grepper https://github.com/dlants/shuck

- a file picker that renders in your current window (like oil) and uses more intelligent signals for ranking (like frecency) https://github.com/dlants/needle

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#26

Post by ventana »

I don't think anything has changed for me regarding my vim usage. Previously, I would use vim to make simple changes in the code or configuration files, making larger changes in VS Code. Now, with agents, I never need to make larger code changes manually so I completely ditched VS Code, but I keep using vim in the same way as I did before: for small changes which I want to make manually, for editing configs, or as a scratchpad.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?

#29

Post by fullstop »

mtklein wrote: post #4

On about day 2 of using Fable I realized that the .vimrc I'd been maintaining for 15-20 years would probably never change again. With Opus I still feel like I'm pair coding and want to get in there and make some changes myself, but working with Fable (even Fable managing Opus agents) had me in a completely different mindset, one where I realized I would just be getting in the way.

This makes me sad. We've lost something.
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