Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

You clearly don't have a slightest idea of what you're talking about.

Emacs is actually still amazing in the LLM era. Language is all about plain text. Plain text remains crucial and will remain important because it's human-readable, machine-parsable, version-control friendly, lightweight and fast, platform-independent, and resistant to obsolescence. Even when analyzing huge amounts of complex data - images, videos, audio-recordings, etc., we often have to reduce it to text representation.

And there's simply no tool better than Emacs today that is well-suited for dealing with plain text. Nothing even comes close to what you can do with text in Emacs.

Like, check this out - I am right now transcribing my audio notes into .srt (subtitle) files. There's subed-mode where you can read through subtitles, and even play the audio, karaoke style, while following the text. I can do so many different things from here - extract the summaries, search through things, gather analytics - e.g., how often have I said 'fuck' on Wednesdays, etc.

I can similarly play YouTube videos in mpv, while controlling the playback, volume, speed, etc. from Emacs; I can extract subtitles for a given video and search through them, play the vid from the exact place in the subs.

I very often grab a selected region of screen during Zoom sessions to OCR and extract text within it and put it in my notes - yes, I do it in Emacs.

I can probably examine images, analyze their elements, create comprehensive summaries, and formulate expert artistic evaluation and critique and even ask Emacs to read it aloud back to me - the possibilities are virtually limitless.

It allows you to engage with vast array of LLM models from anywhere. I can ask a question in the midst of typing a Slack reply or reading HN comments or when composing a git commit; I can fact-check my own assumptions. I can also use tools to analyze and refactor existing codebases and vibe-code new stuff.

Anything like that even five years ago seemed like a dream; today it is possible. We can now reduce any complex digital data to plain text. And that feels miraculous.

If anything, the LLM era has made Emacs an extremely compelling choice. To be honest, for me - it's not even a choice, it's the only seriously viable option I have - despite all its drawbacks. Everything else doesn't even come close - other options either lacking critical features or have merely promising ones. Emacs is absolutely, hands-down, one of the best tools we humans have ever produced to deal with plain text. Anyone who thinks it's an opinion and not a fact simply hasn't grokked Emacs or has no clue what you can do with it.

I would think this could contrast with agentic coding, where the AI keeps generating code, and then you iterate on this process to get the AI to fix its mistakes. With normal human code review, it takes longer to get revisions and can feel like a slog. But with AI that's a much tighter loop, so maybe developers feel extra productive from all these dopamine hits from each interaction with the agent.

When manually coding and in flow state I'd think it's a more consistent level of arousal, less spiky. Probably varies by person and coding style though, which might also explain why some people love TDD and others can't stand it?

we retroactively assume that everyone just obviously adopts new technology, yet im sure there were tons and tons of people that retired rather than learning how computers worked when the PC revolution was happening.

No, they underestimated their own abilities for the most part; the estimates for AI-disallowed tasks were all undershot in terms of real implementation time.

What they overestimated was the ability of LLMs to provide real productivity gains on a given task.

No one would call one a noob for not using Vim or Emacs. But they might for a different reason.

If someone blindly rejects even the notion of these tools without attempting to understand the underlying ideas behind them, that certainly suggests the dilettante nature of the person making the argument.

The idea of vim-motions is a beautiful, elegant, pragmatic model. Thinking that it is somehow outdated is a misapprehension. It is timeless just like musical notation - similarly it provides compositional grammar and universal language, and leads to developing muscle memory; and just like it, it can be intimidating but rewarding.

Emacs is grounded on another amazing idea - one of the greatest ideas in computer science, the idea of Lisp. And Lisp is just as everlasting, like math notation or molecular formulas — it has rigid structural rules and uniform syntax, there's compositional clarity, meta-reasoning and universal readability.

These tools remain in use today despite the abundance of "brand new technology" because time and again these concepts have proven to be highly practical. Nothing prevents vim from being integrated into new tools, and the flexibility of Lisp allows for seamless integration of new tools within the old-school engine.