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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

#51

Post by discardable_dan »

beemboy wrote: 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…

Coining this phrase now: "It's the tokens stupid"

Hooking up to and generating calls across filesystem APIs cost multiple orders of magnitude more than calling `ls`. These tooling ideas are interesting, though. Maybe Kenneth_E._Iverson was right all along?

Talking to another senior dev over drinks tonight, we both worried not about our work but about who might come up never having written a single line of code. Never even opened a terminal. Is looking at the code something you learn in semester 5?

I think computer science education is going to stomp onward, poorly. And we will get that generation. And things like "terminal tooling is going out of style" won't even be said any more. Hacker groups will turn from discussions about new ideas to talking about doing leetcode without AI.

Our art died because we used our art to kill it. We are the last human masters.

That's a funny thing to think about.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#52

Post by gdorsi »

keithnz wrote: post #35
jurschreuder wrote: post #32

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.

This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.

It really depends on what kind and of job you do.

If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code.

Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#53

Post by gbro3n »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #29
gbro3n wrote: post #21

I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing…

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

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#54

Post by jaypatelani »

Hmm.. asistant i can't escape this screen what is it?

A.i: this is vi text editor.

Human: exit from it and open word processor.

A.i: rm -rf /

Human: good job exiting. Now where's my word processor? ....

Hello? Where's my word processor? Brint it on screen.

Can you hear me ?

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#55

Post by layer8 »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #14

I have been an emacs user for almost a decade now. My laptop taskbar is: terminal, filebrowser, emacs, firefox. With emacsd running to make startup instance. This week I removed emacsd service and Emacs from my taskbar because I had more miss-clicks - accidentally opening it - than I had need for it in the past few months.

What’s interesting is that as an Emacs user and caring about instant startup, you use clicks to open things instead of keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#57

Post by i_am_a_peasant »

vohk wrote: post #49
beemboy wrote: 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…

I'm not about to put any money down - I lack that degree of confidence in my prognosticating - but I doubt the terminal will ever really vanish, for much the same reason that 20 years of touch screens hasn't really put in a dent in a keyboard and mouse for serious work, and game controllers have barely changed despite multiple attempts at VR and other interfaces, and why the stylus is still going strong after more th…

Yeah, I can’t imagine why anyone would think that moving away from the most explicit source of truth possible would make AI work any better. the things good UIs excel at is data representation, not processing. Representing a tree or a graph in text sucks. But AI can sure read a text representation of a tree or a graph and reason about it much faster than through a UI

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#58

Post by keithnz »

bandrami wrote: post #48
keithnz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.

You're forgetting to count the time you spend deleting the excess stuff

no... I'm not.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#59

Post by keithnz »

gdorsi wrote: post #52
keithnz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.

It really depends on what kind and of job you do. If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code. Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.

not my experience, they write fast code, and if you ask them to optimize, can pull all kinds of tricks out of the bag. Even with some of the niche stuff I work on, they seem really good.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#60

Post by armchairhacker »

keithnz wrote: post #35
jurschreuder wrote: post #32

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.

This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.

AI can generate code much much faster.

But do you never need a specific change (e.g. bugfix), that even describing in English is slower than just doing it? Especially in vim where editor movements are fast.

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