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I have officially retired from Emacs

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#71

Post by Avamander »

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 tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs.

Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#72

Post by Blackthorn »

iLemming wrote: post #63
imoverclocked wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance ... > you can easily extract text from anything This is what gives me the most pause.

Care to explain? Why is it? You think it's dangerous or some other reasons?

Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#74

Post by hegstal »

Avamander wrote: post #71
schmooser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs. Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

On the other hand, given there is prior art in Elfeed, why wouldn't it rapidly converge on feature parity?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#75

Post by LeCompteSftware »

compiler-devel wrote: post #43
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #39

> Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. For you, perhaps.

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

"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently.

- The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological.

- The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again.

- Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such):

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
"Future of software engineering" folks should stuff like this in mind. What model is going to undo Mythos's mess? What if that mess is your company's product? Hope you know some very patient humans!

[1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#76

Post by weakfish »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #60
anthk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is the analysis bad? Burden is on you to explain that.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#77

Post by vor_ »

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.

???

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#78

Post by ww520 »

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…

Same here. Emacs has been the stable editor for all kinds of language changes, tool changes, and IDE changes. Emacs is great with LLM, as LLM is mostly text related and Emacs is great in capturing and dealing with text.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#79

Post by vor_ »

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…

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#80

Post by iLemming »

devin wrote: post #55
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…

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.

> I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing

Very true. There's an enormous tacit knowledge gap. Check this out:

I have to use Mac for work. My WM is Yabai, which is controlled via Hammerspoon (great tool on its own), which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have a Lisp REPL. MCP connected to that REPL can query and inspect every single window I have on my screen. It can move them around, it can resize them, it can extract some properties of them. It's figuring out stuff like: "pick a selected Slack thread from the app and send it into an Emacs buffer", or "make my app windows work like Emacs buffers" - pick from the list and swap it in place. Or "find the HN thread about retiring from Emacs among my browser tabs and summarize the content"...

Never in my life have I been more grateful to my younger self for grokking the philosophy of Lisp. Recent months have only reinforced my firm belief that this 70-year-old tech is truly everlasting. Thank you, John McCarthy, for the great gift to humanity, even though so weirdly underappreciated.

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