Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic
by brabel on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:01AM
(#50469567)
This will enter the history books as one of the greatest examples of a group of people who appear to love technology inexplicably becoming the most feverishly opposed group against a new technology that happens to replace the craft that they used to claim as their own. Never did they stop to think about the millions of people who lost their jobs because of computers, many because of programs written in emacs. Of all communities, this is the most surprising to me since Lisp was THE AI language for most of its existence, but since it doesn’t happen to be used by the new generation of AI technologies, I suppose AI is now the enemy. This is pathetic. I love emacs and all I can say is that emacs is actually making a comeback for me due to AI since now all I need is a simple text editor that lets me quickly type in some code when I am feeling nostalgic. And let my LLM finish the tedious parts I don’t want to do, thanks to gptel. There are many other LLM related emacs extensions which clearly shows a lot of emacs users are not prudes when it comes to LLM. This post absolutely does not represent my view as an emacs user, and that of most others, to the best of my knowledge.
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Computers made a lot of things easier, faster and more reliable until complexity became too great for people to contend with. They also created far more jobs than what they removed.
LLMs are excellent bullshit artists. They can produce large quantity of very plausible output but you just can't trust it and since the volume is so great it is difficult to inspect or understand so it is essentially useless if you want quality.
If you just want quantity, they are great.
You can still work with an LLM and realize huge productivity gains with NO reduction in quality. Just review and vet the code you generate with an LLM, a little bit at a time.
This is not going to give you the velocity that a dark factory will give you, so it will not be much used in the corporate world except in Space Shuttle type scenarios, but for open source where they have a quality bar and manual review and signoff anyways, it's still a JATO bottle strapped to your car compared to what we were doing before.
And if you pass this speed boost up, you're just a damn fool.
If you think quality cannot be achieved with LLM, I recommend you try using AI to review your code. Use an existing skill to do it, all harnesses have one but you can customize it to tell the AI what to look for.
I can guarantee you will change your mind.