"I'm not using any AI."

Nor am I

This seems to trigger snarky replies on HN, including personal attacks

Every day HN readers are forced to read endless submissions and comments that amount to "I'm using AI". Great, thanks for sharing

A single commenter remarks, "I'm not using AI". A slew of smarky replies ensues, including personal attacks

How do we explain this

These nonsensical "arguments" with non-believers feel like what we saw with cryptocurrency before SBF went to prison

Cognitive dissonance from being confronted with evidence they're not actually speeding up, when us non-AI devs are only having issues with managers pushing it from above even though we're not actually falling behind?

I also use vim and don't use AI.

I see coworkers reach for AI to perform many tasks that are made trivial by a few keystrokes or a simple macro in Vim.

This is patronising. We know what macros are. There’s benefit in general, adaptable tools, even if some tasks can be accomplished with something more rudimentary. That’s not the point. Hell, the software that you’re so proud of writing with vim could very well be superseded by someone using an LLM to do it in a worse, more wasteful way. But it’s the tool that’s there, and it’s the tool that they use for everything else, and it more easily ties into their workflow.

Comments like this are increasingly just the sounds of someone sticking their head in the sand.

Your macros are not implementing features, fixing bugs, and writing test cases.

I literally just watched someone do a text replace on a conference call to show me how good Claude was today.

Said with such confidence...

They are. And have been since the 1970s, and will continue to do so for another 50 years.

Particularly the fixing bugs parts. So often is one bug manifested across 200 lines in 50 different files, and to fix it you need the same 5 exact keystrokes across those 200 lines. vim (or in my case Emacs) macros will allow me to find the fix in the first of these lines where I also define the macro, and then apply in mere seconds across the other 200 lines.

As for writing test cases, copy-paste has worked fine since unit tests became popular in the 1990s, and will continue to work fine for the next 30 years. editor macros are not too dissimilar to copy-paste-edit.

Which is fine. Burn your tokens (with all the carbon emissions they generate in data centers) doing more involved tasks like that. Don’t waste it on silly, easy things like simple macros, search/replace, etc. AI doesn’t need to be a hammer used for everything.

Does that answer the question? Or can you just not help mentioning that you don’t use AI? Because if so, congrats! I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself.

It does if you read deeper into the answer. They are two different worlds.

It literally doesn’t answer the question. “I don’t qualify to answer” isn’t an answer. Don’t tell me to “read deeper”. We are all reading the same comment. You aren’t more intelligent than anyone else here.

Rejecting the implied premise is a legitimate answer

Q: How to properly grill a steak? A: I'm vegetarian; do not eat meat. Completely irrelevant for the question asked. But I do feel the need to express how superior I feel about it.

Sorry I didn’t throw the answer grenade in your face like Claude. It’s there if you look for it.

You are trying to save face. You didn’t answer the question. You don’t ‘speak for a tribe of Real Developers That Use Vim’ or whatever. You just aren’t qualified to answer but couldn’t help getting on your soapbox.

I know a couple of vim users at work that *do^ use LLMs for coding tasks. Let me guess, they aren’t from “your world”. They aren’t real vim users. Get over it.

'a lot us' you say? just speak for yourself so at least you will sound confident; all you've demonstrated here is your ignorance of LLM, and those who use it, and you amplify that by throwing silly examples to prove your ignorance.

llm usage or not, code browsing/refactor etc still need human usable tools like vim/git/tmux etc.