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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

#81

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

Note you're replying to a guy who never said anything at all about being "faster".

P.S. Software developers aren't being paid to be "fast". In fact, being "fast" is called "technical debt" and you're usually punished for it as a software developer.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#82

Post by keithnz »

1718627440 wrote: post #78
keithnz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

possibly there's cases where maybe you want to change some text or something, but I don't think its faster in vim given you likely don't have that file open, and by the time you get to the file, and location, you could have fixed it with your agent, not only that, you could have generated the test case and then fixed in your agent

I think you missed the point. It takes more time to write English prose than to open a file and just fix it, so unless the time the LLM needs is somehow negative, it's not going to be faster.

I didn't miss the point, it just feels like the people saying that really aren't using these tools as it just is not my experience at all. I've been a Vim user for multi decades now. There's just no way, it's far easier to type a prompt except maybe if you know exactly what file and exactly where in the file, you might be able to do it as fast as telling the AI to do it. It's not hard to get a minor fix done with a prompt and doesn't take too much English in my experience.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#83

Post by hbogert »

simianwords wrote: post #74
rekrsiv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A terminal still offers a more composable interface than a GUI. Analog feedback is still a concern for high level pilots. You are confusing power tools with entry-level instruments.

interesting, what do you mean by composable?

Albeit it's the shell, I assume he means piping

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#84

Post by hbogert »

xenodium wrote: post #62

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP ( https://agentclientprotocol.com ), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xen…

You have Every right to plug your agentshell here. I love it and I don't even care that much for agents (yet)

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#86

Post by specproc »

I'm a long time VS Code boy, but have recently started dabbling in Vim because I'm exhausted with AI.

Every VS Code update these days feels like it's exclusively AI orientated. The Vim approach seems fundamentally opposed to an AI-driven development model, or at least says, like everything else, "sure, you can do that, but set it up yourself."

I find the Vim philosophy appealing coming from a work environment that wants to replace me with API calls to American companies.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#87

Post by bozhidar »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.

Well, I guess that means I'm still a pretty poor writer. :D (I'm the author of the article) These days I do use AI to touch up my grammar and fix my typos, but I'm still write my articles myself and you feel that the article lacks substance - that's on me.

For me essays are something very personal, so it'd hard for the AI agent to read my mind about my thoughts on a subject.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#88

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

jwr wrote: post #72

My time spent in Emacs has *increased* with the increased use of AI. I have to read, edit, accept and reject all those code changes and Emacs+Magit is pretty much the best interface for that.

Yeah, I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years but recently tried the Claude-code package and magit and it’s a pretty great combo.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#89

Post by small_model »

Not sure these and other editors have a future when the SOTA models can generate code better than 99% of the best devs in the world 100x faster, 10x cheaper and never get tired or want pesky time off. Maybe the use case it to view code while humans are still required in the loop (I think they just about still are) or to edit a commit msg.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#90

Post by danebalia »

I gave up on emacs and vim. Its like fighting bad design. Im long time users of both, but no plugins sufficiently provide a quality integrated experience with AI, MCP and agents. Emacs and neovim AFAIK are not designed for streaming. And with what each of them do, you can just build an IDE yourself (Claude Code). I combined with Vim bindings, spacemacs interface and built an IDE from scratch in one week with Rust. Its my daily drivers. This is true customization.
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