The Emacsification of Software

Posted by rdslw 1 day ago

The Emacsification of Software(sockpuppet.org)

308 points | 204 commentspage 2

152334H 5 hours ago|

> For the kinds of software I’m talking about, you want the prompts more than you want the source code.

Please do not do this.

Per OurWorldInData, >50% of the world lives below $10/day in 2026.

A $200/mth AI subscription costs ~66% of that.

Generation costs still exceed distribution costs by a wide margin.

Uploading costs you nothing, and it can help the poor.

0xpgm 2 hours ago|

> Uploading costs you nothing, and it can help the poor.

Could you expound more on this? Are you suggesting that less energy use in data centers would help the world's poor?

jen20 1 hour ago||

I read the suggestion as being that the world’s poor aren’t paying for AI tokens (or subscriptions) to generate software from prompts, and that sharing the _output_ is more beneficial to people. The reduction in energy waste is secondary, and benefits _everyone_.

tombert 7 hours ago||

I've done some similar stuff.

I wanted to reference some TLA+ community stuff. I was initially just copy-pasting the specs into mine, and that worked well enough, but it was a little tedious and I was kind of afraid I might accidentally forget to give attribution to someone if I used their spec.

So I got Claude to build a TLA+ package manager for me. It's just a basic thing in Rust that allows me to plop a deps.json file into my TLA+ folder, and put a git repo url and commit hash, and then I use tree-sitter-tlaplus [1] to rename the modules to have a basic namespace to avoid collisions. It took about 30 minutes of fighting with Claude, but then it worked fine.

As AI gets better and better and cheaper and cheaper, I suspect it will be easy to have tons of custom apps for everything. It's a brave new world.

[1] https://github.com/tlaplus-community/tree-sitter-tlaplus

hiq 3 hours ago||

I was looking for a good markdown / file editor on Android available the Play Store on a device where I can't install F-Droid / arbitrary apks, as I had been using https://github.com/gsantner/markor which is not available there. My conclusion was that there's basically none, to the point that it looks like the best solution would be for me to publish a version of it there, just so that I have access to it.

kettlez 15 hours ago||

Enjoyable article. I've had the same feeling about native software becoming more accessible with the help of llms. However, I tried the app and opened a large-ish markdown file and immediately had scroll hangs and then the app crashed. Making a small proof of concept is easy, but performance and reliability are still hard.

edit: typo

aledem 17 hours ago||

I remember how just 5 years ago the majority of speakers were saying how absolutely everyone should learn computer programming. Already many years ago VBA was built to bridge the gap between engineers and other professions. Well, the gap is completely closed now, everyone can do what has been talked about for decades: programming computers. And I suspect even markdown will become obsolete very soon, eliminating this very last remnant of what programming used to be.

ogogmad 16 hours ago|

Maybe it's a good idea for SWEs to consider using LLMs to train themselves into new careers -- just in case.

Most other "knowledge" professions -- by which I mean teaching, programming, some engineering, and the arts -- are even further along into obsolescence. That said, you can still use the knowledge gained in a knowledge profession to convert into a more hands-on profession. We might have a bit longer before humanoid robots destroy all hands-on job opportunities as well. Once that happens, every person will be equally poor and destitute.

bananamogul 14 hours ago||

"the terminal itself, which is almost always monospaced and thus fatiguing to read"

It is? Why? I read monospaced text all day long. I don't find it fatiguing in the least. In fact, I think I might prefer it to non-monospaced text.

bandrami 8 hours ago||

This anecdote may be the key to the productivity mystery of LLMs: the output is appearing in the form of software that wasn't ever economical to make before so kind of by definition won't appear in productivity metrics. Though at least in my professional life since we have a configuration control protocol I probably will continue not seeing any impact from AI (for better or worse).

iLemming 15 hours ago||

Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes?

TacticalCoder 14 hours ago|

> Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes?

I'm using Emacs since last century and I've got 3 000+ lines of custom Elisp code I wrote (with maybe only a few hundred lines copy/pasta'ed from other configs).

I'm always using a recent Emacs compiled from source and now with LSP, org-mode, Magit, tree-sitter, ivy/avy/counsel/swiper with ripgrep (thanks burntsushi) integration etc.

I had zero frigging idea what gfm and gfm-view for Emacs were.

But I'll look into it now!

iLemming 8 hours ago||

I know, right? You'd be like "using Emacs like a boss", going with your keyboard "frrrrrrrr" (well, no, that's not Emacs, Emacs would be like "C-c C-c C-c C-c C-x 8 and only then frrrr"), managing entire k8s clusters, building it from the source using most esoteric build options, --with-fries-n-ketchup, and all. And then some jerk comes out of nowhere and tells you about fancy-pangolin-mode that's been sitting quietly in core Emacs since the Prohibition and you're like: "goddammm... I've been using it wrong, my life is meaningless..." :) We're old people. I mean, an eleven-year-old who opens Emacs becomes old in an instant. We have invented doom-scrolling. We've been going through the M-x menu way before twitter and reddit made it a thing.

theletterf 3 hours ago|

Had somewhat related thoughts on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035796 (Most vibe-coded tools are not for you)

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