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Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by danielvaughn on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @04:44PM (#50459123)
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight, but now everyone's just sending a drone." Perfectly said. For those of us concerned about editor efficiency, it's hard to know where to go from here. For years I'd been working on a design tool that was inspired by Vim - entirely keyboard driven using pneumonic keychords. But LLMs really took the wind out of my sails, because eh, why bother now? Somewhere deep down I feel that it's still viable, because I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important. I just don't know if it will be considered important by everyone else.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by adamddev1 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:06PM (#50459353)
> "I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important."

Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps, veya thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.

It is almost hypocritical for AI enthusiasts to say we don't need to look at code anymore, while everything they do is build on piles and piles of infrastructure and tools that are carefully hard-coded, deterministic building blocks. The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.

I am just constantly baffled by people thinking that because we can make (crappy) end-user apps and one-off tools, no one needs to code anymore. Does any build solid tools and libraries. Does anyone still get pleasure from building a rock solid, snappy app?

I can feel all the AI coded apps and website turning to ever buggier sludge under my fingertips, and people are rejoicing that this is the way of the future.

I refuse. I will not touch Claude.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by danielvaughn on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:10PM (#50459410)
I understand the sentiment. I do think it's important to experience it for yourself - not to convince you (I'm less and less convinced as the months go by) - but just to understand the visceral feeling that leads people into AI psychosis.

At times it feels literally magical. But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by adamddev1 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:17PM (#50459492)
I read about a guy who was doing a documentary about crack addicts. They told him he needed to try it once to understand. He did. He then got addicted, lost everything and spent years on the street. Years later he finally got sober and finished the documentary.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by bloopernova on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:32AM (#50464534)
> But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily > barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.

One metaphor could be a car. You have to motivate yourself to get out and walk now, since a car can take you almost everywhere.

Like the people who circle the parking lot trying to get the parking space closest to the store entrance, you can live your life around the "convenience" and not see the problems with what you're doing. Or you can be the person who intentionally parks far away from the entrance so you get a few more steps in. Or the person who cycles to the store. Many metaphors murdered malignantly.

But since this is mental rather than physical, we might end up being couch potatoes like you said, flipping through channels rather than reading, or doing a hobby. (is "doing" a hobby correct? It sounds like "doing a business")

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by wtetzner on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:24AM (#50469920)
> One metaphor could be a car. You have to motivate yourself to get out and walk now, since a car can take you almost everywhere.

I get where you're coming from, but this metaphor doesn't really land for me. I find driving to be far more stressful than walking, and therefore higher friction than walking.

But your point still stands.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by coldtea on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:36PM (#50459777)
>Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.

Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by fock on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:21PM (#50461070)
and we'll see how that plays out. The way I loom at the chains of "AI" adds feature and feature needs 5 extra PRs over a year to fix it, I think this will be fun!
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by kragen on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:00PM (#50460862)
> The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.

I think this is an interesting hypothesis and want to see what happens.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by Schlagbohrer on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:53AM (#50464679)
"rock solid, snappy apps"

Where were those apps even before AI came along? Every piece of software I use in my day across Windows and iOS is a slow, laggy, piece of resource hogging garbage, and that was true long before AI came along. I'm not convinced that AI makes this worse, it might make it much better.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by bitwize on Thursday November 12, 2026 @06:49AM (#50465857)
We used to have them—in the 2000s and before. These days not so much, but there appears to be a correlation between the push to use LLMs and a hockey stick in the enshittification curve.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by skydhash on Thursday November 12, 2026 @07:23AM (#50466164)
i used a ton of good apps on windows xp and 7 (sumatrapdf, codeblocks, notepad++,…), macos (things, bear.app, cleanshot,…) and Linux. But that was a bit before SaaS and their electron clients. Now I still maintain a lean desktop, but it’s mostly standalone software with no reliance on the “cloud”.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by rootnod3 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @04:29AM (#50464966)
Same. That is why I am over in a corner happily coding away with Common Lisp and McCLIM to write myself an editor that mixes ACME UI with Lisp. Is it ultra-polished? Hell no. But it definitely keeps me sane and I know what I wrote.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by hobo123 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:41PM (#50471125)
Nice, Acme is underrated and needs more experimentation/adaptation as a concept.
Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by rootnod3 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:56PM (#50488074)
Only on the UI part though. I wanted a Genera/CLIM approach, so having that filesystem thing sitting there felt wrong. But I did like the “all UI is text” approach. And with CLIM presentations it can go very far.