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/df275005769b654618...
> I am no longer using Mutt nor running my own mail server. In general less terminal stuff for me.
https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/e331e367c75f66aaa9...
LLMs have inspired a similar change in me: with a big change in how I work, I feel I can and should be more flexible with adopting new tech, which involving freeing myself of previous choices.
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.
My .emacs config has improved and I wrote my own Emacs based coding agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent
I'm still exploring all the ways the agent and I can collaborate using Emacs as a shared medium, but at the moment am super optimistic about it.
This is what gives me the most pause.
When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.
It's so comfortable that it acts as an impediment to change, since some types of change are uncomfortable.
This can feel like friction to me.
When I remove customisation, I am more "open to experience", and often find preferable tooling.
this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.
For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it
One example: it disables the default Ctrl-F search function but its own search function is subpar (no match counts/hlsearch, e.g.) and often clashes with website's built-in search (on Github, e.g.).
It doesn't work on the default newtab either, and changing the default newtab somehow makes opening a new tab slower (that's FF's fault, I guess)…
solid extension, big fan
Since I needed to keep around a Chromium anyway, and I already am forced to use one for work, it became simpler to just use solely use a Chromium.
In the process I dropped some extensions.
It's been great.
I'm actually excited about the potential for a future where local agents help improve the operating system experience as I go by making changes based on my use case. All local, of course. I do not want to trust a cloud provider with my use cases/behavior on my computer so they can sell me more ads...
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.
Anyone who has actual corporate team lead or management experience understand AI as effectively a junior dev who doesn't have great persistent memory. These devs using AI are reviewing, guiding, and validating the work given to them by AI just as they would from a junior dev.
The inverse of your statement is more apt; it's distressing to see people so angsty about AI usage. There are going to be skilless vibecoders and then there are going to be experienced devs (like OP) who figured out their AI workflow to multiply their productivity 2-5x.
What the future holds for AI model pricing-- that is a valid concern. But I don't think that's what you intended.
Are you sure OP belongs in the second group? He explicitly said he doesn't read all the code generated by his AI:
> I have not read most of the code, and instead focused on results, so you might say this was “vibe-coded.”
this is just like being promoted from developer to manager. some people like it some don't. with AI there is another dimenstion: some people like managing machines instead of people, some don't.
it's not for me. i don't want to stop writing code. i don't mind to manage people but i don't want to manage machines (at least not with an unprecise interface/outcome as AI provides). consequently AI may be fine for this person, but it is not for me.
It's unclear what you're saying here... Yes, AI-induced psychosis is a real problem and the frontier labs' mitigations are ineffective, to put it mildly. But using AI as a coding tool doesn't have anything to do with psychosis.
Saying they have psychosis is a rude exaggeration.
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.
> Models you can run yourself are toys.
Now I may be old, but whenever we put a lot of faith in unaccountable megacorps it sure seems to have backfired a lot (remember when Amazon removed 1984 from people's libraries?). As long as a model running locally on a regular laptop bought from the supermarket isn't good enough I'm gonna remain sceptical about current AI.
There's also ethical and environmental considerations, but let's see if we can walk before we try to run.
Maybe a lot of people who are doing that aren't admitting that they've stopped writing code, but when all you're ever doing is manually fixing a few lines, or moving blocks of code to more sensible places, fixing jumbled parameters in a call and such, you're not really writing code anymore. You're now a chef in a kitchen yelling at assistants and just touching things when dealing with communicating a correction to one of those dimwits is more frustrating than just doing it yourself.
You still have to be a cook to be a chef, though. But the reason I say that AI is dumb is because I tell it to do things, it does them in a dumb way, and I complain at it and tell it to write it in a sensible way. It screws that up, and I tell it to do it again, and not to screw it up. I'm still not coding. If it goes into a loop of nonsense, I touch things with the intention of doing just enough to knock it out of that loop (or rather keep the new context from falling into it.)
"After the bubble pops" we might see that a lot of new chefs can't actually afford assistants. But just as likely, the overbuilt (government-subsidized directly and through policy) capacity might end up getting written off, and at the cost of electricity and maintenance costs could stay reasonably good. Or algos improve. Or training methods improve.
it is inconceivable to me how anyone could ever enjoy working like that. but whatever floats their boat.
Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI, so if you're still not, that's a PEBKAC. You are not using the tools correctly. Figure it out before you complain.
Absolutist rubbish.
> "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security."
As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).
So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense.
> Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI
I don’t see any major business impact.
???
>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.
Anyone know of something like this?
(setq user-emacs-directory (format "~/.emacs.d/magit/%s/" emacs-version))
(setq custom-file (concat user-emacs-directory "custom.el"))
(setq make-backup-files nil)
(setq auto-save-default nil)
(setq create-lockfiles nil)
(setq inhibit-startup-screen t)
(setq initial-scratch-message nil)
(require 'magit)
(defun setup-standalone-magit ()
(magit-project-status)
(delete-other-windows))
(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'setup-standalone-magit)
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree)" = "true" ]; then
exec emacs -nw -q --no-splash -l "/path/to/magit-init.el"
fi
The IntelliJ git client is my favorite by far, I am curious what do you not like about it?
Doom emacs and Spacemacs are both good starter kits to give you an idea of what you could do.
I just use emacs for programming, not note taking or email reading or the other things people love it for. Strengths: magit, wgrep, vterm, buffer management, plugins & packaging. Weaknesses, irritations, embarrassments: yaml-mode, responsiveness, overlays & mini-buffers.
There is also an ecosystem of applications for Emacs that are really good. They don't require you to use Emacs as your editor (you can run, say, Magit as a standalone instance) but if you do, they integrate really well with each other.
Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and embrace the malleability, stick with it for a while - at some point you may discover some enormous feeling of empowered liberation from years of bullcrap you had to deal with without even realizing.
Here's a comment I posted on /r/emacs couple of weeks ago:
So yes, Neovim is snappier, and so what? I'm genuinely curious, I consider myself a die-hard, hardcore vimmer. Yes, I use Emacs today, but I'm still a vimmer. I sometimes use Neovim too - having vim skills comes handy with pure terminal workflows.
So, honest question - why should it appeal to me - the idea of ditching Emacs and moving to Neovim (or whatever) full-time?
- I have a few thousand notes in my Org-Roam note taking system. My notes can contain anki-cards - my spaced-repetition content is just my notes; my pdf annotations - they are just my notes; my health records - are just my notes; I don't need to use Postman - my API investigations - are just my notes.
- I don't need to use Ansible, Chef or Nix to maintain my dotfiles - they are tangled from an .org file - I just need Emacs to bootstrap the whole system.
- I read Reddit and Hackernews in Emacs.
- I manage my email in Emacs.
- My Telegram is in Emacs.
- I search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, and more without leaving Emacs.
- I write everything in Emacs (even this very comment), because I have thesaurus, spellchecking, definition and etymology lookup, translation, dictionaries, LLM integration - I can ask AI at the point of typing text (in just about any buffer).
- My AI coding assistant is in Emacs.
- My PR reviews happen in Emacs. Everything git related happens in Emacs. I go through my GitHub notifications in Emacs.
- I watch videos with Emacs - it allows me to control them directly - I can speed up, mute, pause the video, extract transcript - all while taking some notes.
- I do my Jira in Emacs.
- I open and search through Slack threads in Emacs.
- I learn programming languages through exercism.io in Emacs.
- My file manager is in Emacs - I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired in customizability and capabilities.
- I access my browser history and even browse and switch tabs of my browser - in Emacs.
- I even OCR text out of screenshots with Emacs.
So now tell me, why should I care that there is something, anything, whatever - snappier, prettier, shinier, more popular? Why should I ever feel FOMO, if it can never do even the small subset of what my current system is capable of doing today?
Because deep down they are incomparable categorically. Separate the tools from the foundational ideas and you see the very different value. Vim-model of text navigation is fantastic, practical, brilliant idea. Once you grok it - you can take it anywhere. You can use it in your editor, browser, terminal, WM. Emacs is rooted in another, even more brilliant idea of practical notation for lambda calculus. These ideas have no overlap. But understanding the philosophy of each (ideally both) could open so many different possibilities.
Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?
Try doing that with Elfeed2.
Vi/Nvi2 users can almost do the same with Unix pipes and apertium/translate-shell/some lingva CLI translating tools for the whole document/regex selection/lines, a la Emacs. So can sfeed users, where depending on the feed they can pipe the plumbers' output (or just hack the scripts) to any other translating tool:
git://codemadness.org/sfeed
Heck, a few years ago I could reuse Telega.el's (Telegram client) translating functions for non-Telega buffers translating some text guide in the spot. So, did the blogger actually win something?
I have long struggled to learn emacs and use it effectively. Just for the fun it, If I were to use claude as I my teacher, how can I ask it to teach me to use Emacs? I don't like to ask questions and go back to try it. I want it to be a drive that will assist me with the usage. Has anyone tried such an approach to learn emacs?
Yesterday I typed "Set the default YAML indentation to 2 spaces." It came up with
(use-package yaml-mode
:defer t
:config
(setq yaml-indent-offset 2))
(add-hook 'yaml-ts-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(require 'yaml-mode)
(setq-local indent-line-function #'yaml-indent-line)))
What does (inside Droid) mean ? Do you use any package to integrate to claude code in emacs?
You can start with vanilla Emacs with zero config and Claude/Copilot/Codex/etc, running separately. Your first goal is to have the LLM running inside Emacs - ask the LLM how. It probably will recommend gptel - as one of the most popular and robust choices, go with it.
Once you get LLM tools to modify Emacs state from within, you can just go crazy. You can tell it to change colors, fonts, ask any stupid questions, whatever. It will do it without losing a beat - no restarts, no waiting, no copy pasting - just flow.
I know a lot of people become comfortable with the default editing tools in Emacs, and many of them are good, but on the whole, vanilla Emacs does not ship with a great editor.
The Vim family makes up amazingly well designed editors.
Evil is a Vim implementation in Emacs. It is the best of both worlds, and not just on paper. It actually works.
In what editor can you peak&edit folded text without unfolding it? Answer - only Emacs.
Ask someone who needs to write texts in Arabic or Hebrew - Emacs has far, far better RTL support.
Org-mode is just light-years ahead of anything else, nothing even comes close to it.
So, your stupid joke (if you really believe it) is on you, truly.
I've been using it since 1994.
Whoa, shit, I'm old.
It was my first experience with emacs as well, but in MS-DOS, ca 1990. Did not know there was a CP/M version.
For you, perhaps.
- 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.
[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.
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-...
Yet the author ended up doing the latter and it's not really made clear why. Why?
i'd use wxWidgets because it is the only cross platform toolkit i am aware of. if you can share your alternative then maybe this could help some people.
You're right Spacemacs is essentially a batteries-included version of Emacs.
I also suspect it allows easier consolidation. Moving from a deprecated lib to a new (and better) one for example.
Implementations will likely homogenize a bit as well, but on the other hand boy am I glad not to see an increasing amount of bizarre naïve hand-rolled implementations for some things.
In the past, coding up this interaction would be a chore, but Gemini makes quick work of the elisp. After a minute, it's doing exactly what I need: cursor on markdown link, open to right pane, C-c C-c toggles the todo item and closes the pane; C-u C-c C-o opens in obsidian. This functionality can be achieved in any number of ways but Emacs is fantastically well suited for a problem like this.