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I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#121

Post by claytongulick »

kryptiskt wrote: post #101
bitwize wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for making a really important point.

The lifespan of software can easily be ten or more years.

If it takes a few more months to write by hand to ensure correctness and proper abstraction, what does that save over the lifetime of the codebase?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#122

Post by rgoulter »

Avamander wrote: post #71
schmooser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs. Elfeed2 doesn't load content for most of my feeds, elfeed does. I also integrated elfeed-tube, which shows previews of videos and their transcripts, making it no-brainer to get a summary without watching the whole video.

> I tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs. Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

My understanding of the context is the author is no longer using Emacs, and is very excited about the productivity from AI.

My experience with LLM technologies is it does make generating the code a really quick part. It may be reasonable to take much more time to specify things up front (rather than emergently as you would by hand). -- I mean, if you've got a well crafted description of what you want, you'll be able to get a working program MUCH quicker with an LLM, today, compared to writing it out by hand.

Would it really be surprising/shocking if an LLM was able to rewrite (most) features from an existing software, to a new software?

It seems like the reality today is, we've gone from a maintained software in a niche ecosystem with happy users, to a more fragmented one where everyone has an LLM write their own half-baked one.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#123

Post by lmz »

claytongulick wrote: post #121
kryptiskt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for making a really important point. The lifespan of software can easily be ten or more years. If it takes a few more months to write by hand to ensure correctness and proper abstraction, what does that save over the lifetime of the codebase?

It's a rare piece of software that lasts that long. For the rest of us there's LLMs.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#124

Post by troad »

wwarner wrote: post #70

My usage of emacs is so vim-like that I’ve tried switching a few times. Vim is definitely faster, and overlays and cursor placement is much simpler and more intuitive. But there were still feature gaps and configuration issues that prevented full adoption.

You may get good bang for your buck out of neovim. With only a very minimal set of plugins, it has replaced all other IDEs for me. (They're also making good progress Sherlocking their core plugins, so the future is bright for those of us who dislike plugins for core functionality.)

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#126

Post by SoftTalker »

Blackthorn wrote: post #72
iLemming wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain? Why is it? You think it's dangerous or some other reasons?

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

What? You run emacs as root?

Anything an LLM does on your computer should happen it its own account. No sudo config of course, or at most one that is strictly limited to what you want to allow it to do (risk here, as many programs have non-obvious paths to general command execution).

It should have zero access to your private home directory or your system configs. You can have access to its files of course. That's the beauty of separate accounts and permissions.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#127

Post by kstrauser »

orsenthil wrote: post #114

On the topic of Emacs. I have long struggled to learn emacs and use it effectively. Just for the fun it, If I were to use claude as I my teacher, how can I ask it to teach me to use Emacs? I don't like to ask questions and go back to try it. I want it to be a drive that will assist me with the usage. Has anyone tried such an approach to learn emacs?

There's a nice built-in tutorial for actually editing text with it. Press control-h then t to launch it. But that's just for using the editor. For actually configuring it, I've found that Opus 4.6 (inside Droid) is exceptionally good at tweaking my init.el.

Yesterday I typed "Set the default YAML indentation to 2 spaces." It came up with

  (use-package yaml-mode
    :defer t
    :config
    (setq yaml-indent-offset 2))
  
  (add-hook 'yaml-ts-mode-hook
            (lambda ()
              (require 'yaml-mode)
              (setq-local indent-line-function #'yaml-indent-line)))
Now I can hit tab to indent YAML by 2 spaces, and I learned a little in the process. I'm delighted with this setup.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#128

Post by noctuid »

nz wrote: post #104
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Is this satire? I can never tell anymore.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#129

Post by orsenthil »

kstrauser wrote: post #127
orsenthil wrote: post #114

On the topic of Emacs. I have long struggled to learn emacs and use it effectively. Just for the fun it, If I were to use claude as I my teacher, how can I ask it to teach me to use Emacs? I don't like to ask questions and go back to try it. I want it to be a drive that will assist me with the usage. Has anyone tried such an approach to learn emacs?

There's a nice built-in tutorial for actually editing text with it. Press control-h then t to launch it. But that's just for using the editor. For actually configuring it, I've found that Opus 4.6 (inside Droid) is exceptionally good at tweaking my init.el. Yesterday I typed "Set the default YAML indentation to 2 spaces." It came up with (use-package yaml-mode :defer t :config (setq yaml-indent-offset 2)) (add-hook '…

> I've found that Opus 4.6 (inside Droid)

What does (inside Droid) mean ? Do you use any package to integrate to claude code in emacs?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#130

Post by godzillabrennus »

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 am running Ubuntu as my desktop operating system. I would never do this without an LLM to do the work of keeping it functional for me. Today, Rise of Nations wouldn't launch. Never had that problem before. Seems the driver for 32-bit games and my Nvidia GPU weren't getting along after an update. Codex was called in and solved the problem for me in about 5 minutes. I just copied and pasted the Steam log and let it tell me what to do. Tadah.

I'm actually excited about the potential for a future where local agents help improve the operating system experience as I go by making changes based on my use case. All local, of course. I do not want to trust a cloud provider with my use cases/behavior on my computer so they can sell me more ads...

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