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Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

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Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#151

Post by iLemming »

reddit_clone wrote: post #130
mark_l_watson wrote: post #103

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…

I am reduced to keeping Emacs and VSCode open on the same files/project :-) Use the LLM from VSCode and switch back to Emacs for regular editing! 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 m…

Install ECA. Read my comment in the same thread. Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs - it is game over for anything else. Nothing even comes close to the experience. I've been functioning in ADD mode - Annoyance-Driven-Development. I'd get annoyed by some small issue, and without missing a beat, I'd start typing. Well, sometimes I don't even type anymore - I'd just speak and let Whisper transcribe it and Emacs performs some crazy shit. It's not even funny how crazy it is.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#152

Post by iLemming »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.

Does it really matter if AI was used? Is the article substantial? Does it tell a story? Is the narrative engaging? Is it factually accurate?

I get that LLMs are still capable of generating slop of nonsense, but when it really doesn't matter - when you're not writing an academic paper; when you're not developing a medical device; when you're not dealing with avionics - when the extreme determinism is not required. What difference does it really make?

Of course, story telling is by nature subjective - and you may say: "well I dislike the style", then who stands in your way to consume it differently? You can always feed it to LLM and ask it to style it differently - summarize it, explain it in detail, turn it into a sea shanty, whatever.

I'd argue that good story always survives "translation". You wouldn't dismiss Iliad because it was served to you in Aeolic Greek, you'd find a way to translate it to your mother tongue to enjoy it nevertheless, wouldn't you?

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#153

Post by iLemming »

himata4113 wrote: post #119
hackerInnen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't know what the * is going on I'd assume that a good portion of people working on things like that know what is going on. My (very very subjective) feeling is that they just spit out WAY more tokens than needed, so that it hits the limit as fast as possible and people buy more. And the people responsible for that are probably the evil evil PM's

I don't know I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli and that's a very low bar compared to a tui.

> I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli

That's right. I started with Claude in the CLI. But then I found a way to hook it up to my active, running instance of Emacs. And since Emacs is neither an editor, nor an IDE (in the typical sense) but rather a Lisp-REPL with embedded editor, I can now fully control virtually any aspect of my editor via LLM, running in the very same editor.

I can't even describe the feeling - it's absolutely insane. I can for example give the LLM some incident ticket number, then ask it to search for all the relevant Slack conversations, PRs, and Splunk logs, build me some investigation audit log and dump it all into an Org-mode buffer with massive data and then reduce it into a sparse tree where the entire document is folded as much as possible, but the selected information is made visible. Then I can continue the investigation, while the LLM would be adding and removing data from that buffer dynamically (or adjusting the sparse tree), depending of how the investigation proceeds. It's crazy, because I can ask it to programmatically change virtually any behavior of my editor on the fly.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#154

Post by karthink »

iLemming wrote: post #151
reddit_clone wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am reduced to keeping Emacs and VSCode open on the same files/project :-) Use the LLM from VSCode and switch back to Emacs for regular editing! 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 m…

Install ECA. Read my comment in the same thread. Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs - it is game over for anything else. Nothing even comes close to the experience. I've been functioning in ADD mode - Annoyance-Driven-Development. I'd get annoyed by some small issue, and without missing a beat, I'd start typing. Well, sometimes I don't even type anymore - I'd just speak and let Whisper transcribe it…

> Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs

gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#155

Post by iLemming »

karthink wrote: post #154
iLemming wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install ECA. Read my comment in the same thread. Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs - it is game over for anything else. Nothing even comes close to the experience. I've been functioning in ADD mode - Annoyance-Driven-Development. I'd get annoyed by some small issue, and without missing a beat, I'd start typing. Well, sometimes I don't even type anymore - I'd just speak and let Whisper transcribe it…

> Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.

YES! I almost forgot about that. What I love about gptel that I can send a request to an LLM from virtually anywhere - any buffer, even minibuffer. Sometimes I "talk" to AI while typing a message to my colleague. I can ask some model to improve my prompt while typing the same very prompt for a different model - that's just bonkers.
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