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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#92

Post by ffsm8 »

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…

> but I doubt the terminal will ever really vanish

I always smiled when in the various Star Trek series (pre 2005) the main crew made something in the holo deck it was always via voice commands and essentially "vibecoded", but whenever details mattered (veeeeeeery rarely, almost never) and a specialist was consulted, that'd be someone clearly looking at a mobile terminal interface

It's obviously fiction, but it amused me nonetheless... And it's possible that that's the future of our industry. But if it is, it'd consider it a dead industry, honestly. Even in that fictional universe, the value the specialist provides is almost never necessary

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#93

Post by hubertdinsk »

keithnz wrote: post #79
mchaver wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without telling us what kind of code you are talking about it is hard to compare. I would say that is true for CRUD web code because there is so much out there that the LLMs can reference.

I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your…

so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything.

Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.

Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#94

Post by HKH2 »

discardable_dan wrote: post #51
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…

Yeah, in the future we will mourn the loss of the art of creating a new JS framework every week.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#96

Post by dbacar »

I dont know what the deal is with these editors that makes them on HN front page so frequently. In my opinion they are good text editors (used emacs for 4 years, and switched to vim nearly 10 years ago) but for coding I see them as a joke apart from some edge cases(clojure, lisp...). They are hard to setup as code editors, lots of customizations are needed and in my opinion it does not pay off.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#97

Post by alexpotato »

> AI makes configuration and extension trivial

I recently said to a co-worker:

"Linux is free if your time has no value" is no longer true in the era of LLMs. Just about any wonky Linux issue can be fixed quickly with even just OpenCode and free models.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#98

Post by gdorsi »

keithnz wrote: post #79
mchaver wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without telling us what kind of code you are talking about it is hard to compare. I would say that is true for CRUD web code because there is so much out there that the LLMs can reference.

I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your…

Software development is a quite vast discipline.

In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way.

That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms.

As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#99

Post by keithnz »

keithnz wrote: post #79
mchaver wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without telling us what kind of code you are talking about it is hard to compare. I would say that is true for CRUD web code because there is so much out there that the LLMs can reference.

I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your…

hubertdinsk, can't reply directly... but yes lots of niche things, especially in the embedded side, automatic test side. We have a lot of hardware, we control a lot of things, sense a lot of things. There's nothing inherently complicated about it such that AI can't code, in fact you feed AI technical data sheets its insanely useful when writing code against that hardware. It's going to pick up on all the weird nuances. It's great for protocols, especially proprietary ones. Anything with spec sheets are good.
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