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Emacs in the Age of Magic
298 points148 comments6.7 average comments/hourSubmitted by ggcr
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There are several points of view here. Some people claim they will never need to "program" again because the LLM will do everything. That text editors are dead... and so is the career of programmer or software engineer. That nowadays, with Claude Code, you can reimplement anything (given a large enough context window, of course). That it is like being an expert in every programming language and system out there. That we should remove politicians and CEOs and put an AI in their place. On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions. That it pulls in libraries and makes serious security mistakes. That it writes tests that are basically incomplete. That it is unable to synthesize and keep context. In short, it has the same flaws as humans. I think these are binary points of view, and both are right. We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them. There has to be another way. Nobody questions the versatility LLMs provide, or the boldness they give you to take on new projects. But I am not convinced that programmers or software engineers are going to disappear. I am not convinced that a manager can ship a new feature in a couple of afternoons and then lay off, or skip hiring, a junior or senior developer. There is a line near the beginning of Dune that goes something like this: "there was a time when men handed their thinking over to machines in the hope of being freed, but that only allowed other men with machines to enslave them." We need to find a new path between smartphone addiction and being dumbed down by LLMs.
Comment on Hacker News · 8 direct replies> [W]e are here to declare our intent to use and develop a version of Emacs that is free from LLM-generated contributions regardless of whatever policy GNU decides upon. We invite them to weigh the costs and do the right thing, in which case we will continue to support them. But if they are not willing to do so, we will continue to use and develop an LLM-free version of Emacs anyway, even if it is not GNU Emacs. https://human-emacs.org/
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct replies> I believe a sufficiently interested emacs developer with a $100 plan and a long weekend could hammer out a pretty good first cut. That no one's yet done it is clear evidence that no one really wanted these things so much as they wanted to talk about it. The disappearance of bikeshedding doesn't look like an obvious one but it's a huge loss. Imagine if every scientist resolved to refer to already written books and carry on their research in closed labs with no discussion with the rest of their field.
Comment on Hacker News · 5 direct replies“AI has turned Stallman's goal of software freedom on its head. Having your computer do whatever your imagination can think up -- that's real freedom. The only catch is you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.”
Comment on Hacker News · 7 direct replies> The irony is rich that AI has turned Stallman's goal of software freedom on its head. Having your computer do whatever your imagination can think up -- that's real freedom. The irony is that Stallman promoted free software and allot of code got published online for free, and now LLMs have trained on this code. Without Stallman there will be no vibe coding.
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesIt's a whole new world. We need to be thinking about modularity with well-defined APIs now, to isolate the chunks created by AI coding. Maintainabilty requires firewalls.
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesFun fact: The README of excali-mode has 25 matches of pattern `, not `. I know, looking for these patterns isn't useful at all these days in any sense... but it's just too tempting. It all comes down to the attitude towards hacking, or any other profession / hobby for that matter, whether one (at a specific mood) enjoys the process or the results. The latter group has something to show off in the end, the former usually doesn't. But they know what they earned.
Comment on Hacker News> RMS appeared in a recent video recounting his CSAIL work on a circuit analyzer in which he, and I'm paraphrasing, "didn't model the circuit as a system of equations to be solved, but rather approached it much as a human would" by applying a series of diagnostics. bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI
Comment on Hacker NewsLoved it. > But there's one glaring headscratcher, and that's its full-blown, self-contained implementation of a terminal emulator, in Rust no less. In the before times, a developer would undoubtedly seek such a heavy lift from off-the-shelf kit, but the holmes replicated over a coffee break what a billionaire with infinite resources had been toiling over the last five years. Is this really true, though? Did model improvement since Ghostty began simply eclipse Ghostty and anything achievable with that now "legacy" code base? Would that project be better off abandoned or started over from scratch with Opus 5.5? Or is there something more there? These are honest questions.
Comment on Hacker News"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 mnemonic 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.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies