A Eulogy for Vim (opens in new tab)

> "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?"

I've seen people celebrate horrors beyond my comprehension. Cheer the deaths of innocent people because it may inch some abstract national goal closer to a similarly abstract measurement. Insist that lives in one place are worth less than lives in another.

Should I ask "what am I missing"?

I don't think so, sometimes you draw a line on moral or ethical grounds. Some of those lines should never be given the ability to be fluid. It will always be wrong to bomb a school of children, just like (for Drew and I) it will be wrong to rip the livelyhood from under millions of people's feet for shareholder value. It will be wrong to ignore damaging consequences to the environment. It will be wrong to insist a low quality imitation should ever hold the same value as the original idea.

I think the point is that regardless of what benefits LLMs are bringing to the table, there are a list of downsides that Drew views as non-negotiables. It doesn't matter what other people are seeing, because he sees a fundamental issue underlying the entire premise.

It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.

Well I think he’s taken a moral stance against AI, so it doesn’t matter to him if other people find it useful.

Why should he should say something he doesn't believe? We don't have to agree with him.

> Lord forbid if people disagree with you.

This is too shallow of a take. Especially when your very next point objects to what he uses as a default reference frame that you disagree with. Lord forbid drew disagree about, I think priorities, and values?

> why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?"

It's the same question. I sympathize with both questions, I constant feel both frustrated, and broken with how few people care about quality, and participating fairly. I try very hard to find the positive aspects "everyone" claims llm codegen provides. I'm looking hard, and can't find them. It's painfully average, often worse so when it gets lost. It doesn't and can not help me, only get in the way, what am I doing wrong? Why is everyone missing something I see as obvious? But again, both could easily be true from both frames you suggest. "Why can't people identify this as trash" could very easily be followed by "what I'm I missing from the equation?" and be the same thought/idea.

> so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?

I mean, it's titled, A Eulogy for Vim. That seems to be what it says on the tin, no?

> why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?"

Ironically, you are not considering that he is seeing something that you are not, but you are not asking "What am I missing?"

See, that sword cuts both ways.

It's a little wrong. It's probably going to replace middle class jobs more than the jobs of the poor.

This is backwards. If it weren't for 'eliminating jobs' we'd both be peasant farmers right now. Automation has improved the standard of living and raised wages for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Buried (IMO) in the post is:

> sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software.

...where he links to a comment in a closed issue where someone accuses a contributor of using an LLM to generate patches: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...

The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.

What specifically has gone poorly? Is a dozen bug reports high or low compared to previous versions of the software where humans are writing the code?

I don't use ledger-cli myself but I do use the similar software hledger. I don't pay very close attention to hledger's development process, but I haven't noticed any bugs that affect me in years of using it.

I think apps like this are the real risk. Who is going to get in trouble because vim* has a bug from AI generated code? Errors in your accounting software can get you into audit/compliance trouble.

Not plugins: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...

Very on brand for this gentleman

The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?

It does things for them and tells them what to do. Is that really making programming more accessible? I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. But accessible as in a path to actually start working on things yourself and developing an interest? For most people vibe coding 99% of their lines, I doubt it. And I don't really think that's a problem to be honest, but I don't really buy that it makes programming in and of itself more accessible, more just the result of that programming.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.

I disagree, I think the over-reliance in these tools turns AI providers into the final gatekeepers of the profession. And with the raising prices of hardware, I'm afraid AI will make computing as a whole inaccessible to most people.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me.

I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this.

Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be.

AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more.

I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there.

Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced.

It's awesome.

Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn.

The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.

> an incredibly based individual

This was never the case.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The influx of people i have zero desire to interact with into my normal online spaces has been incredibly painful.

Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.

I've been reading and reading about DeVault for more than a decade now. If I can point to one person on the internet and definitively say that their today's version is better than a decade ago, it would be him. (Yes, I can say that he appears to have improved better in this time than I myself have, which can be interpreted in a more than one way).

In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation.

People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.

>This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.

Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.

There’s a lot of good points in your comment, but fwiw it’s not clear whether they exist to dismiss a complaint or muster focus on the issues.

You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?

If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.

Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.

> I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.

The cobalt thing is apparently misinformation. You've been misled.

Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Please don't do this. "editors outlive their creators' reputations/departures" - is a reasonable point. But to make it land as a zinger, you decided to dig up some most inflammatory Stallman material possible, that does a lot of collateral damage to the framing.

Emacs the tool and Stallman the person are not nearly as coupled as your comment implies. Stallman created Emacs, yes, but the Emacs community drove him out of the FSF in 2019, pushed back hard when he tried to return in 2021, and has been actively distancing itself from him for years. The community's resilience despite Stallman is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to say - it's not like Emacs users were defending him in solidarity.

Tools transcend their creators - it is actually an interesting point and worth making. You just didn't have to push Stallman shit here.

> defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself

Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that.

I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.

It's amusing seeing this brought up in the thread when:

a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender). b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.

> I prefer VS Code with Claude Opus 4.6, it makes me more productive during my working hours so I can take more quality time with my family.

That's great you can spend more time with your family, but the code you're writing this way is, by and large, probably crap.

Didn’t think I’d have to clarify what quotes mean in this context but using an LLM to help with coding is fine and people should get over it as it’s already everywhere anyway.