Posted by ggcr 16 hours ago
bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI
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.
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 anyone 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.
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.
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.
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")
I think this is an interesting hypothesis and want to see what happens. I'm not really willing to go all the way to vibecoding, because I want to understand the system design. But I do have bots writing all the new code.
Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.
but now everyone's just sending a drone."
This definitely is a new era and, personally, I love it! (Also I have broken my right arm so I can't write code even if I wanted to. I'm dictating this text.)
This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
I spend a lot of time thinking about AI’s effect on me, as a person. TLDR: it’s a mixed bag: for non-coding things, AI has helped me learn and understand the world better. For coding, using AI coding harnesses and agents feels like an addiction.
I will say that I have used AI coding tools to make my Emacs setup the best it has ever been in 40+ years using Emacs.
It is weird to be using tools that sometimes make me think more about myself and their effect on me than the actual technical work I am doing.
Navel gazing.
Is that a common thought? I learned vim, then emacs, and various other tooling not because I wanted to increase my speed competitively, but just to reduce my frustration with the gap between thinking and doing. Using something like VSCode to code is like playing on a laggy piano (if that exists). You think about I need to quickly update the signature of this function and it turns into a mouse/keyboard chaotic dance with your eyes focusing all over the place. It's like doing a three legged race.
With emacs and vim, I think about the code, notice that I want to change to change something, and can do the necessary actions (almost) subconsciously. Which means, I never stop thinking about the code. It may be longer or faster than someone using another software, but the advantage for me is to rely mostly on muscle memory while I'm thinking deeply about some problems.
Another thing is multiple buffer/views at once. This is why I don't like editors that have vim mode, because it's a pain to browse code with them, especially when you want a global view of something. With both emacs and vim, I can have multiple related files/sections of files/output of commands visible at once. Like how you would want physical papers and lay them on a desk.
If you expect that you can complete some task just from the keyboard, then the idea of having to use the mouse interrupts what you're doing.
The original post gives "stage and commit in git" as an example. Magit is much nicer than CLI, since you can quickly invoke the actions you want; it's less effort than typing out the full command on the CLI. -- With LLM coding agents, getting an LLM agent to make a commit is slower than doing it yourself in magit (if all you're going to do is stage and commit), but it's much less effort.
Why are people so sure this will keep scaling? We're still so far away from me being able to get anything even remotely close to what I can imagine using a free model running on hardware I own.
Then you need to remember there are a lot of very powerful people currently invested in not letting us have any of this, so I really don't think it's time to call free software irrelevant yet.
Pick MLite from https://t3x.org and you'll get it pretty fast. Or with invariants under Lisp. Or its weird cousing, CLIPS, born from Common Lisp clauses.
On code quality, Neomacs (an Emacs clone in Rust, it has Elisp support) crashes a lot. And by a lot, I mean once you hit the menu with the mouse, it segfaults.
>he only catch is you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.
Is not about the rules, but the relations. It's a network of clauses, and not something akin to if-then-else with flow controlling. There's no actual "flow".
I didn't got a crash on Linux/Wayland. And I didn't tested on MacOS or Windows.
What's your device envionment?
Could you please submit a GitHub issue to neomacs? (better with a minimal reproducible script and log `RUST_LOG=INFO ./neomacs` can output the debug log)
It's a highly experimental thing someone decided to mess around with, without any prior design discussion with any Emacs core devs. It's like a forty-minute-old baby and you're asking it to parallel park without crashing. What's your point here, I don't get it?
GNU/Emacs is incredibly stable. It's one of the most reliable pieces I've ever had; I sometimes run it for months without ever restarting. Which I can't say about pretty much any app on my system. Including the system itself.