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Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

batsov.com

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#131

> 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…

>functionally useless skills

The dog would disagree! :-)

I admire your mother. She is a real hacker.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#132
post #84

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP ( https://agentclientprotocol.com ), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xen…

You have Every right to plug your agentshell here. I love it and I don't even care that much for agents (yet)

That's nice to hear. Thank you!

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#133
There's an unofficial Claude Code plugin for Vim. It only does plan mode afaik. I haven't used it, but I have considered it.

That said, I've been using Vim as my editor for the last ten years. The last few companies I worked for had integrations with VSCode, so I use it sometimes so that I could show those off, but nothing about it makes me want to give up my awesome Vim setup with my weird color scheme (Dalek).

It took me a few months to go fast with Vim, but once I did, nothing compares. (Yes, I have tried the Vim plugin for VSCode, though it's been a few years.)

RIP Bram; thanks for giving the world this wonderful and timeless piece of software!

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#134
post #38
post #16

I'm not convinced that terminal orientedness of AI tooling itself will last. My hypothesis is that it was chosen by developers of the current generation building for developers of the current generation. I hypothesize that there is a future where command lines and terminals don't matter, and hence I feel the focus will shift to, as the author points out, to planning, reviewing and ideation tools none of which demands…

A terminal still offers a more composable interface than a GUI. Analog feedback is still a concern for high level pilots. You are confusing power tools with entry-level instruments.

I won't debate this. I'm a fan of the enduring pipe operator and the simple elegance of process composition in *nix. My point was more: what will we need them for? To review code written by a bot? GUI tools are better for this IMHO, or at least, terminals aren't any better than GUI tools, possibly worse. To read the plan output of Claude code, why would I want raw markdown in a terminal when I can read the formatted output as intended in a different tool?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting "the future is IDEs/GUI/etc" but that it's some potentially new refinement over TUIs and GUIs where the focus is no longer on editing, tinkering, debugging, but perhaps new tools that make it easier and efficient to work with agent swarms and give them instruction/prompts.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#136
post #135

"VS Code has Microsoft. Cursor has venture capital." I would have framed this as a disadvantage ;p

Because it is. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. all aim to own software production capabilities. It's quite clear.

Using free software and not giving away ones own abilities to create is as important now as it's ever been.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#137
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start using speech to text more. You likely have the hardware needed to run a Whisper model locally.

I will give a go. But my rambling mumblings to Gemini on my phone sor far confirm that I write with more clarity than I speak

I use SpeechNote with FasterWhisper and I've found it to be much better than any cloud dictation services I've tried (which, to be fair, is not a whole lot... they all suck so much that I give up fast).

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#138

I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user. I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always after some time give up and just quickly do it manually. AI Agents will just full the code with maaaassive swaths of texts it will just make a project unusable. We even get paid to turn client's AI LLM Claude sketches into real programs.

The only thing that I find AI is consistently excellent at is giving me a snippet to do something particularly esoteric in my shell and parsing out errors from a massive logfile that I would probably have taken an order of magnitude longer to find myself.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#140
I'm yet to find a satisfying vim AI integration. I want something that blends into my vim workflow, and does not require me to switch Windows and copy paste or reload my open buffers after AI agents edit my code.

For instance I would love for it to seamlessly melt into a "highlight comments/pseudo code" -> some keybind, then AI would expand those to actual code for instance, or I don't know.. but something not like what we have currently

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