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I have officially retired from Emacs

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#101

Post by kryptiskt »

bitwize wrote: post #85
vor_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I…

I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.

And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#102

Post by anthk »

iLemming wrote: post #87
anthk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

> Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue lo…

No, this is like fishing with dynamite.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#104

Post by nz »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #75
compiler-devel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently. - The impact on computer science seems…

We should start a support group.

I feel like LLMs[1] are going to cause a kind of "divorce" between those who love making software and those who love selling software. It was difficult for these two groups to communicate and coordinate before, and now it is _excruciating_. What little mutual tolerance and slack there was, is practically gone.

Open source was always[2] a fragile arrangement based on the kind of trust that involves looking at things through one's fingers (turning a blind eye may be more idiomatic in English), and we are at the point where you just have to either shut your eyes, or otherwise stop pretending that the situation can be salvaged at all.

Just a thought I had: some people think that LLM-shaming is declasse, and maybe it is, but I think that perhaps we _should_ LLM-shame, until the AI-companies train their LLMs to actually give attribution, if nothing else (I mean if it can memorize entire blocks of code, why can't it memorize where it saw that code? Would this not, potentially, _improve_ the attribution-situation, to levels better than even the pre-LLM era? Oh right, because plagiarism might actually be the product).

[1]: Not blaming the tech itself, but rather the people who choose to use it recklessly, and an industry that is based almost entirely on getting mega-corporations to buy startups that, against the odds, have acquired a decent number of happy-ish customers, that can now be relentlessly locked-in and up-sold to.

[2]: I mentioned a specific example of good old fashioned, pre-LLM, human plagiarism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46540608

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#106

Post by mattdeboard »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #44
mattdeboard wrote: post #14

I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode. Anyone know of something like this?

>i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode The IntelliJ git client is my favorite by far, I am curious what do you not like about it?

It's not that i don't like it. It's that I've got 10-15 years (i think) of muscle memory with magit

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#107

Post by krautsauer »

bovine3dom wrote: post #6
farfatched wrote: post #4

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df27500…

I wonder what friction/maintenance he found with Tridactyl For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it

We're talking about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...?

One example: it disables the default Ctrl-F search function but its own search function is subpar (no match counts/hlsearch, e.g.) and often clashes with website's built-in search (on Github, e.g.).

It doesn't work on the default newtab either, and changing the default newtab somehow makes opening a new tab slower (that's FF's fault, I guess)…

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#108

Post by kstrauser »

parasti wrote: post #86
jb1991 wrote: post #68

I used emacs full-time for many many years. Then I switched to Vim or other editors with Vim modes, also for many years. I have to be honest, I don’t see a particularly clear winner between them. Model editing is a bit unusual in many ways. There are some things that it certainly makes easier, but I personally found that the overall process of editing and writing code in real time for me was more efficient in a singl…

My vim muscle memory has paid off more for me than my emacs muscle memory. Emacs was the better editor, though. Anything that doesn't have Vimscript is an automatic winner IMO.

I use ^a to go to the beginning of a line and ^e to go to the end nearly everywhere. Many Emacs keystrokes are so pervasive that they're not often thought of as Emacs keystrokes.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#109

Post by WolfeReader »

mattdeboard wrote: post #14

I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode. Anyone know of something like this?

I was a loyal magit user for a decade. Now I use jujutsu from the command line. It's actually really nice.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#110

Post by habinero »

iLemming wrote: post #81
Blackthorn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.

So? My terminal has the same full system access. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be using Claude code in it. It's contained locally on my computer, I don't see any problem here. I use Emacs like my OS-layer. Why would I complain that my OS has access to something? It would be weird and annoying if it's the opposite.

Yeah, that's incredibly unsafe. You made a footgun machine and you're firing it with no shoes on. Don't run that on any machine with credentials you care about.

At the very least, run it in Docker. It's not a security tool, but it's at least some kind of guardrail against data loss and exfiltration.

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