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

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31–40 of 105 posts

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

#32

I switched from using Vim as my primary editor to using Zed's Vim Mode. When you have a second process editing your project in the background you need an editor that can display those changes immediately without clunky buffer reloads. I've also customized Zed's UI to optimize for reading and reviewing code, and mostly adding notes or small focused edits, rather than writing entire files from scratch.

I’ve done the same. Curious, what changes have you made to optimize the reading and reviewing?

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

#36
I have my own coding harness (std::slop), in that i focus on a vim centric flow. Basically a few commands open. up my $EDITOR which is vim.

1. /edit => opens in editor

2. /feedback => opens the last llm message in an editor so i can inline feedback. Think inline responses in email vs bottom posting.

3. /review => same as /feedback but opens up the diff so i do an inline review. Yes I still read the code it ships.

So basically in this flow vim becomes integral to doing anything involved.

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

#37
post #27

I’m not using any AI. A lot of us aren’t. Vim has done me well for 30 years so I’m not going to throw that away to sharecrop on someone else’s land.

I see coworkers reach for AI to perform many tasks that are made trivial by a few keystrokes or a simple macro in Vim.

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

#38

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.

You're ignoring that AI coding attracts a whole new crop of people who would never have touched computers before. We live in interesting times.

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

#39
I've barely touched Intellij for the last half year or so. I rarely edit code manually at this point. I also did not renew my subscription and am back on the community edition.

I've noticed that my preferences for tools and languages is shifting as well. I'm happy to work with stuff that I previously would have not touched now because it would take me too long to get up to speed with languages, frameworks, etc. That stuff no longer blocks me from being productive. I still care about code quality, good design, etc. but a lot of that stuff doesn't require me to micro manage a code base. In the rare case I want to open something in an editor, I use vs code. I've removed a lot of the plugins in that as I'm not really using them any more.

I actually do reach for vi on the command line sometimes. But I've never been very good with it. I know how to do simple edits and save the file. I just never really got into it. I memorized a handful of key bindings somewhere in the nineties and that's it. I know some people that live in this editor and swear by it but for me it's just something that's there by default that is vaguely useful in a pinch if there's nothing else.

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