I was saying almost this same thing to a coworker. I'm building something that's like Emacs, but for agents, and it's mostly a Markdown-forward tool for managing all the agents and agent coding harnesses, and it's a vendor-agnostic things....If anything it's like a newer, faster, fancier org-mode, but knows how to inject all the right context into all the agentic projects.

This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....

LLM-assisted development really is like Literate Programming. I haven't used LP in a while, but I wonder how useful that workflow would be now. Almost like the reverse of LP, lots of agent work punctuated with smaller bursts of human-created text.

Yep. But I wouldn't say "the reverse", you were always supposed to document first, or write code and comments simultaneously while weaving them together.

I mostly use Emacs not to write code, though. In fact, getting Claude to do explorations for me and output its findings as org docs is fantastic.

yeah, I was about to mention I mostly use emacs for switching between projects and exploring codebases and I'm not aware of a better way to do this that actually gives you a sense of how the code is structured. Text editors might be irrelevant for the people who are not reading the code anymore, I guess, but that's not me.

Emacs is not an advanced text editor, it's more like an OS. I run Claude Code inside emacs (with the claude-code-ide package). I seriously think LLMs will usher in a new golden era for emacs because you can now reap all the benefits without having to learn elisp.

I did, with another package, but running Claude inside a terminal has no glitches and I seldom have to edit code anymore. I'm using emacs almost only to edit md files in which I make Claude write analysis and plans. I make changes, add clarifications, we iterate. Most of the times the chat is enough. I remember that I discovered that I broke Ruby autocompletion only weeks after I did (I investigated the cause.) Maybe notepad would be enough but I stick to emacs. I am about to get to 40 years of marriage with it.

Yeah. AIs let you exist without learning. A great advance for the brainless.

If everyone is just vibe coding elisp, who is left to learn it deeply and push it forward as a language and ecosystem? Or is AI just going to do that too. Very unfortunate world we live in

Who cares? Do you know how a carburetor works?

Yes, do you not?

AIs will also assist you with any learning you want to do.

They'll sabotage you while you fool yourself into thinking you're learning.

Again, a great advance for the brainless.