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I have officially retired from Emacs

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#151

Post by kqr »

minikomi wrote: post #65
iLemming wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically. LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the…

Asolutely. It doesn't have to be an either-or. I use gptel and org mode when I was to be really hands on driving the development. It's a very different mode of interacting with models, and the way newer models are trained to play nice with harnesses makes them very obedient. https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/

Is this your site? I cannot find an RSS feed for it. I'd like to subscribe.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#152

Post by kqr »

arikrahman wrote: post #90
squigz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone else not understand what people mean when they refer to the "friction" supposedly inherent to these power user tools? Almost none of the configs/scripts/etc I use for my heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup get changed for years at a time.

Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.

How do you nixify your Emacs configuration? I've looked into it but at the time the advice was to specify dependencies both in Nix and in .emacs.d, which seemed redundant to me. Is there something like callCabal2Nix for Emacs?

Edit: Or do you mean "declaratively" in the sense of using something like straight.el?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#153

Post by kqr »

Beijinger wrote: post #115

Emacs is an outstanding, extremely powerful piece of software. It just lacks a decent editor.

I know this is the joke, and I know Evil is the jokey reply, but ... both sides of the joke carry a grain of truth, as good jokes do.

I know a lot of people become comfortable with the default editing tools in Emacs, and many of them are good, but on the whole, vanilla Emacs does not ship with a great editor.

The Vim family makes up amazingly well designed editors.

Evil is a Vim implementation in Emacs. It is the best of both worlds, and not just on paper. It actually works.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#154

Post by johntash »

fingerlocks wrote: post #99
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.

can you elaborate? Heavy vim user here, have considered using emacs in vim mode to quell a decades long nagging curiosity. Just need a compelling nudge.

If you haven't used it before, give it a shot. Worst case you waste a few years of your life.

Doom emacs and Spacemacs are both good starter kits to give you an idea of what you could do.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#155

Post by anthk »

lmz wrote: post #123
claytongulick wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In JS land, for sure; for systems' programming and software made for small and medium companies, that's granted.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#156

Post by wiseowise »

bitwize wrote: post #25
lowsong wrote: post #5

> With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work From the linked post:[0] > I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional capacity I no longer write code myself. My current situation was unimaginable to me only a year ago. Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. Turns…

No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. The productivity gains are too great. The era of 100% human-written code is over. People will still do it as an idle curiosity, for personal projects only they intend to use. But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI (like, afaik, NetBSD) will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capab…

> You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality.

So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense.

> Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI

I don’t see any major business impact.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#157

Post by wiseowise »

bitwize wrote: post #59
anthk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-... >You are not using the tools correctly. Stop being deluded, man. When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys. Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics. Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid col…

> But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards.

Strange, I don’t see any punchcards inside of my computers, but for some reason I still see code behind anything that LLM does.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#158

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere

You should’ve started with this. Take a really deep breath, take your phone, find closest park, go slowly there (don’t prompt LLM on the way), find a green patch on the ground (it’s called grass) and touch it.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#159

Post by piokoch »

iLemming wrote: post #136
0x20cowboy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.

Can't agree more. Lisp was discovered/invented for the purpose of AI research. Of course, modern neural nets and transformers is a big departure from McCarthy's vision of AI - logical, interpretable, symbolic. However, if the current wave of AI hits a wall - and many serious researchers think it will, or already has at the margins - there's growing interest in neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural nets with sy…

Well, this is because "normal" programming languages are one step above AST. So LLM has to work with program text, which is much easier than regular human text, as it is constrained to well defined number of keywords and grammar, but still this is pretty variable. Lisp is just AST, so it is one level lower. I guess that at some point LLM-s will stop writing human-readable code, as this is additional obstacle, they will work directly with binaries or virtual machines code (like in Java), because this will be easier and eat less tokens.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#160

Post by internet_points »

schmooser wrote: post #40
TFNA wrote: post #3

The author is the developer of the RSS reader Elfeed, which a lot of Emacs users use several times a day. Though the article talks about a vibe-coded wxWidgets-based GUI application called Elfeed2 that he wrote as a replacement, Emacs afficionados would be loath to leave their Emacs environment and switch to that. Hopefully Emacs elfeed finds a new maintainer.

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 don't use elfeed, but installed elfeed-tube just for youtube-with-transcripts :)
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