I still like Sublime Text

AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an existential mirror, and each person's experience will vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.

Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.

I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past month.

My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with enough editor integration that we can both see what we're doing.

I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it encourages tool scopes one might never have dared attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could probably knock off.

I'm more of less forced to use VS Code at present and it's an overengineered slow mess.

What sets IDEs apart from trying to convert an editor to an IDE with a bunch of plugins is:

- somebody somewhere is hopefully sitting down with a cohesive vision of tying these tools together, instead of an assemblage of plugins each with their own visions. I would very much prefer to use their vision (a la macos/windows/Ubuntu) vs trying to configure each plugin to my own (arch/Gentoo). It could be an age thing, but at this point I really don't have the enthusiasm to become an expert at 12 different config file syntaxes and read the docs for all the options for each plugin i would need to tweak.

- an IDE is all encompassing in certain ways that is amazing. For example, Jetbrains is not only a fantastic code editor/refactoring swiss knife, it also has excellent git integration, and can leverage the same code navigation capabilities within diffs and PRs. It will autostash in branch specific stashes, and I can visually browse and diff these. I can attach to databases and get full SQL query and view capabilities, so it isn't just about general purpose programming languages.

- it can be hard to explain to people who haven't used a language specific IDE, how much further along its refactoring capabilities are compared to any LSP. Note that this applies much more to Java/C# than to something like python, both because of static typing and decades of investment.

- as an example of integration, say you add a new function in a file. Not only does Jetbrains highlight the modified file in the Git commit panel, but the structure panel will actually color that function differently and so on.

- due to widespread use of Jetbrains in certain communities, people will build valuable plugins to relatively niche things. So Jetbrains has excellent CMake support and decent Bazel support.

- I like the keyboard, but I also like and acknowledge that the mouse is much better at certain things. For interactive reading, I like I can right click on a commit and say "rebase from here" instead of looking up, copying and posting the red into my git rebase -i command. Conflict resolution, line by line inclusion etc. is also easier with a mouse.

I am very competent at the command line, but beyond a certain project size, IDEs just make sense to me.