I have officially retired from Emacs

I have officially retired from Emacs
nullprogram.com

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 out I like it, and having tasted the future I don’t want to go back to the old ways.

It's deeply distressing to watch people fall into AI psychosis. Being smart, accomplished, or experienced is no defence.

After the bubble pops and the industry realises the damage these tools can do to people, folks like the author will have to confront that they were taken in by a lie. Many won't be able to confront that.

[0]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/

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 active Emacs instance. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test things, I even made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just simply run it, but to actually play it without losing. It was insane.

Also, Emacs is all about plain text - you can easily extract text from anything - from the browser, terminal, CLI apps, Slack, Jira, etc., and you can do that on your own terms - context can appear in a buffer, in your clipboard, become a file or series of API requests. That is really hard to beat.

Perhaps you're confusing "not using AI" with "not being dependent on AI", those are very different things.

The edge isn't from avoidance, it's from using AI as leverage on top of real skill. A strong developer + AI beats a strong developer alone, and massively beats a weak developer + AI. The edge doesn't come from avoiding a tool - it comes from being the kind of person who doesn't need it but uses it anyway. That's leverage. Refusing to use it is just leaving leverage on the table to make a philosophical point.

> After the bubble pops

People like Chris (who is enormously capable engineer) would just move onto different tools, different techniques and paradigms. That is the essence of being a software developer - many of us choose this path specifically because it forces you to learn something new, every single day. That is (I suspect) also another reason why Wellons decided to migrate away from Emacs - he just learned it so deeply, perhaps it's no longer giving him the satisfaction of learning. Which to be honest is hard to believe - Emacs is a boundless playground, there's always something new to learn there.