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.

https://human-emacs.org/

  > I believe a sufficiently interested emacs developer with a

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.

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.

We need to be thinking about modularity with well-defined APIs now, to isolate the chunks created by AI coding. Maintainabilty requires firewalls.

> 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.

bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI

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.)

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.

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".

Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.

HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.

The AI tooling seems too unstable still.

Like demanding commented machine code between 1985 and 2025.

Sure you can get it, but that's not where the software lives even if it's how the software runs.

Reverse engineering closed source software is the simplest thing in the world now. The only reason why more of it isn't done is because it's so boring even minding the AI isn't worth most people's time.

If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude. Get into business. The only way you're going to make it is to join the ownership class. Or pick up a torch or pitchfork and join the revolution.