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I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#51

Post by anthk »

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…

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.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#52

Post by pessimizer »

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…

Not writing code isn't the same as vibe-coding. You can stay on top of AI, make it rewrite the things that look bad, make it refactor until you're happy with how things look, etc....

Maybe a lot of people who are doing that aren't admitting that they've stopped writing code, but when all you're ever doing is manually fixing a few lines, or moving blocks of code to more sensible places, fixing jumbled parameters in a call and such, you're not really writing code anymore. You're now a chef in a kitchen yelling at assistants and just touching things when dealing with communicating a correction to one of those dimwits is more frustrating than just doing it yourself.

You still have to be a cook to be a chef, though. But the reason I say that AI is dumb is because I tell it to do things, it does them in a dumb way, and I complain at it and tell it to write it in a sensible way. It screws that up, and I tell it to do it again, and not to screw it up. I'm still not coding. If it goes into a loop of nonsense, I touch things with the intention of doing just enough to knock it out of that loop (or rather keep the new context from falling into it.)

"After the bubble pops" we might see that a lot of new chefs can't actually afford assistants. But just as likely, the overbuilt (government-subsidized directly and through policy) capacity might end up getting written off, and at the cost of electricity and maintenance costs could stay reasonably good. Or algos improve. Or training methods improve.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#53

Post by pavon »

squigz wrote: post #21
farfatched wrote: post #4

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df27500…

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.

If you are frequently having to use other computers, a heavily customized setup has much more friction either to setup the machine like you want, or remember how to do things without all the customization (if you can't customize or it isn't worth the time).

When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#54

Post by spankibalt »

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…

> "No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable."

Absolutist rubbish.

> "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security."

As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#55

Post by devin »

iLemming wrote: post #7
farfatched wrote: post #4

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df27500…

> 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…

Big same. I have been doing a lot of clojure development, and hooking up my app to a live REPL has given me an absolutely fantastic feedback loop for the LLM. I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#56

Post by anthonyrstevens »

anthk wrote: post #49
compiler-devel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

>> the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding.

This sounds like unsubstantiated hyperbole - can we keep HN grounded in reality, please?

My alternative hypothesis - you don't like agentic coding or maybe LLMs in general. Not helpful for the group.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#57

Post by [deleted] »

anthk wrote: post #49
compiler-devel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

[deleted]

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#58

Post by em-bee »

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…

I no longer write code myself

this is just like being promoted from developer to manager. some people like it some don't. with AI there is another dimenstion: some people like managing machines instead of people, some don't.

it's not for me. i don't want to stop writing code. i don't mind to manage people but i don't want to manage machines (at least not with an unprecise interface/outcome as AI provides). consequently AI may be fine for this person, but it is not for me.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#59

Post by bitwize »

anthk wrote: post #51
bitwize wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#60

Post by nh23423fefe »

anthk wrote: post #49
compiler-devel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

That link doesn't support your statement. It's analysis is bad and irrelevant.
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