121–130 of 155 posts
> AI makes configuration and extension trivial I recently said to a co-worker: "Linux is free if your time has no value" is no longer true in the era of LLMs. Just about any wonky Linux issue can be fixed quickly with even just OpenCode and free models.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your…
hubertdinsk, can't reply directly... but yes lots of niche things, especially in the embedded side, automatic test side. We have a lot of hardware, we control a lot of things, sense a lot of things. There's nothing inherently complicated about it such that AI can't code, in fact you feed AI technical data sheets its insanely useful when writing code against that hardware. It's going to pick up on all the weird nuance…
The approach to get there is the differentiate factor. If you are to tell a probabilistic tool to be 99.9999999% correct it would just be silly.
I run my own models, you can have models for code suggestion/FIM in the middle and you can have another for chat mode. You can point it to your local model if that's your thing or to a cloud model.
Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves.
One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the spring, cards it, spins it and ultimately knits it into a coat she puts back on the dog the next autumn - all by hand. She could just buy a cheap dog coat from Amazon, but she thinks it's funny to see the dog wearing a coat made of its own fur so she bought the equipment and learned the functionally useless skills required to do it.
No matter what level of automation is available, a small number of people will still do things the hard way as a hobby or out of perverseness. We might be living in the matrix in 100 years but I'm certain someone will still be trying to work out how to exit vim in their holopod
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Software development is a quite vast discipline. In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way. That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms. As you imply, this s…
> I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms. This is the root of age discrimination in technology fields.
Just to clarify, I meant to share admiration toward a fellow engineer.
I do not think that age implies any hard assumption, usually brings cultural diversity which is good.
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I think you missed the point. It takes more time to write English prose than to open a file and just fix it, so unless the time the LLM needs is somehow negative, it's not going to be faster.
I didn't miss the point, it just feels like the people saying that really aren't using these tools as it just is not my experience at all. I've been a Vim user for multi decades now. There's just no way, it's far easier to type a prompt except maybe if you know exactly what file and exactly where in the file, you might be able to do it as fast as telling the AI to do it. It's not hard to get a minor fix done with a p…
I'd be curious how one gets to the error rate where they don't think they need feedback loops. Anyone can learn to touch type because the physics are deterministic and can expand from that to touch edit in something that isn't hopelessly WYSIWYG only.
I have been an emacs user for almost a decade now. My laptop taskbar is: terminal, filebrowser, emacs, firefox. With emacsd running to make startup instance. This week I removed emacsd service and Emacs from my taskbar because I had more miss-clicks - accidentally opening it - than I had need for it in the past few months.
What’s interesting is that as an Emacs user and caring about instant startup, you use clicks to open things instead of keyboard shortcuts.
> Let’s revisit the doomsday scenario. Say programming is fully automated and nobody writes code anymore. Does Emacs die? Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves. One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the sprin…
I find Emacs better than ever in the age of AI. Install agent-shell to run Claude Code inside Emacs and give it a skill to run Emacs Lisp using emacsclient. Voila - now you have all the integration you could ever need if you are a little resourceful. Claude Code can now introspect the entire editor and it can manipulate everything. You can have it build whatever features are missing - it will even debug those feature…
Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end. I have used Emacs for over 40 years but I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of VSCode as discussed in the article. When I bought a new MacBook a few months ago, I only installed Emacs, no VSCode, and so far that is working out for me. Also…
Currently trying out various Emacs packages. I got 'claude-code.el' actually working. But there is some flickering and also the interface is a bit wonky.
I will try other packages mentioned in the article.
For the life of me, I can't _edit_ with VSCode. My Emacs/Doom/Evil muscle memory is too ingrained.