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

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51–60 of 105 posts

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

#51
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.

Does that answer the question? Or can you just not help mentioning that you don’t use AI? Because if so, congrats! I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself.

It does if you read deeper into the answer. They are two different worlds.

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

#52
post #50
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.

Q: How to properly grill a steak? A: I'm vegetarian; do not eat meat. Completely irrelevant for the question asked. But I do feel the need to express how superior I feel about it.

Sorry I didn’t throw the answer grenade in your face like Claude. It’s there if you look for it.

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

#53
Tmux with vim as a 50% split, I’ll run an agent in a quarter split.

I have neovim hooked up to a local llama.cpp (through lemonade) for completion, but I have not found a plugin that I’m happy with. Avante is probably the closest because you can give inline instructions, but it both got very very heavily and stopped working with small LLMs so I uninstalled it. I’m using minuet currently.

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

#54
post #31

You're not looking at the code?

Codex has /diff to review the code, or you can look when it’s a Pull Request

Codex can also delete all your files if you ask it to.

Just because it can do it, doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

Crazy to me that people are producing code they don't read, expect another human to review it or just let ai take the wheel and review. Then yeet it out the window into prod.

Why are we not ok with this for our cars, but we are ok with this for our software(banking, health care, etc.). Doesn't make any sense to me.

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

#55
post #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.

This is patronising. We know what macros are. There’s benefit in general, adaptable tools, even if some tasks can be accomplished with something more rudimentary. That’s not the point. Hell, the software that you’re so proud of writing with vim could very well be superseded by someone using an LLM to do it in a worse, more wasteful way. But it’s the tool that’s there, and it’s the tool that they use for everything else, and it more easily ties into their workflow.

Comments like this are increasingly just the sounds of someone sticking their head in the sand.

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

#56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that answer the question? Or can you just not help mentioning that you don’t use AI? Because if so, congrats! I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself.

It does if you read deeper into the answer. They are two different worlds.

It literally doesn’t answer the question. “I don’t qualify to answer” isn’t an answer. Don’t tell me to “read deeper”. We are all reading the same comment. You aren’t more intelligent than anyone else here.

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

#57
post #52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: How to properly grill a steak? A: I'm vegetarian; do not eat meat. Completely irrelevant for the question asked. But I do feel the need to express how superior I feel about it.

Sorry I didn’t throw the answer grenade in your face like Claude. It’s there if you look for it.

You are trying to save face. You didn’t answer the question. You don’t ‘speak for a tribe of Real Developers That Use Vim’ or whatever. You just aren’t qualified to answer but couldn’t help getting on your soapbox.

I know a couple of vim users at work that *do^ use LLMs for coding tasks. Let me guess, they aren’t from “your world”. They aren’t real vim users. Get over it.

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

#58
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your macros are not implementing features, fixing bugs, and writing test cases.

They are. And have been since the 1970s, and will continue to do so for another 50 years.

Particularly the fixing bugs parts. So often is one bug manifested across 200 lines in 50 different files, and to fix it you need the same 5 exact keystrokes across those 200 lines. vim (or in my case Emacs) macros will allow me to find the fix in the first of these lines where I also define the macro, and then apply in mere seconds across the other 200 lines.

As for writing test cases, copy-paste has worked fine since unit tests became popular in the 1990s, and will continue to work fine for the next 30 years. editor macros are not too dissimilar to copy-paste-edit.

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

#59
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your macros are not implementing features, fixing bugs, and writing test cases.

Said with such confidence...

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

#60

"how do you use an ax in the age of AI" Exactly the same as I used it on the age of frameworks, the age of Java and .NET, the age of compilers, the age of ...: you take it by the helve and swing the business end towards the object .

It is more like using skill saw in the age of IKEA.

When you use AI you are not programming, you are having a statistical machine deliver you inferred code which it got by stealing it from everybody else.

This is your carpenter going to IKEA and fitting a cheap furniture slop made by exploited workers in poorer countries, with cheap wood grown on stolen indigenous lands, into your kitchen, when you were expecting custom fit cabinets.

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