Emacs in the Age of Magic (commandlinesystems.com)

Shills and luddites say AI is capable of replacing SWE

Haha. I imagine Security and biology are the garlic and herbs that drive away the vampires and then the vampires sends their lesser minions to do their job.

> there was a time when men handed their thinking

Reminds me of the "knowing where to tap" story. Some already know where and how to tap and only delegate the tapping part. Some start from scratch and expect the machine to tell them where to tap.

The management, like the ship owner thinks that they don't need to call anyone. That's not the main risk though, it's the majority not caring enough to learn about the ship.

only the clueless, stupid ones

I spent most of the early 2010s rewriting systems that had been outsourced to budget offshore coding shops in the 2000s. The software looked a lot like this: no code reuse, no system architecture, just copy pasta over and over.

The client didn't care about this of course, they weren't reading the code. What made them eventually fire the outsourcing shop and hire a guy like me was the bugs that wouldn't get fixed, and the request to fix a bug that caused three more bugs to get introduced.

I'd rewrite the software and it'd be functionally complete with 1/5th the code, and it'd be faster and have fewer bugs, as well as being maintainable.

I actually developed a sick enjoyment about reading through their code and understanding what they were doing. From what I can tell the guys were being put under pressure to produce code and close tickets. I would find big chunks of dead code that I think was to fool their SLOC counters.

Changing schema on one project required a change order and migrations submitted to DB folks so these guys discovered that mysql booleans were actually integers and they could stick whatever number they wanted in there, and ended up using existing boolean fields to store unrelated data! Of course this broke the original functionality in difficult to track down ways!

Software still feels like this grand exploration to me—what's the best way to use a computer? What's the best way to express a program?—and a hackable text editor epitomizes that ethos (though I'm partial to neovim myself). Every time I install a plugin, I feel like I'm participating in a clinical trial of UX design.

I think a lot of us feel this, and the community will have to solidify the ethos that trying out other peoples' software is noble and healthy, exposing you to their ideas, even if it's actually harder and worse in some ways than vibecoding.

(I also think, by extension, the OSS community will need a more developed ethics of project governance. This was a hot issue even before AI, e.g. the terraform license change. But when the default is a vibe-coded bubble, authors will need to communicate either

1. this is just code—use at your own risk, PR at your own risk, or

2. this is a community, here's what we want for/from users, here's what we want for/from contributors, here's how to get involved in maintainance/governance.

You can be either but you have to say which.)

Open source projects have always had forks, public and private. The ability to fork a project and use your own version of it privately, without needing permission or buy-in from others, has always been an explicitly valued aspect of open source software. If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?

I think the reason is an implicit assumption that the production of more unshared work means that less work will be shared. But I don't see why that would be true. We could just as easily, and more likely in my view, see more work shared with the world at the same time we see more work not shared with the world. The incentives for cooperation remain, even as it becomes easier to work alone.

Has anyone made a persuasive argument to the contrary, or provided evidence? It seems like the main problem AI has created for open source projects is an avalanche of bad PRs, not a drying up of good contributions.

1. There are a few, already. I haven't systematically surveyed the landscape, but here's one: https://neomacs.com/

2. AI coding is still far from mature -- with substantial improvements even in 2026. I expect the number of attempts will only burgeon as this capability matures. I can already see a proliferation of emacs packages written with AI.

3. I would expect hobbyist activity to be more correlated with the capabilities of open-weight & cheaper models, for a variety of reasons. Pure hobbyists (esp. outside Silicon Valley) don't often have the spare $$$ for a $200 subscription plan, and won't be as early to adopt AI coding as "professional" software engineers in Silicon Valley (or geographically / economically adjacent somehow).

To live in ignorance, that is to be pushed, pulled or compelled by what you don't understand, for example because you've outsourced your life to the magical mystery programming box, is in his terminology bondage.

Which also explains why all these AI psychosis people sound like crack addicts. Stallman is still completely correct about what software freedom is

Folks can take EMacs as is and decipher it in isolation of Stallman, or any of the other authors.

But even then, how many people understand the internals of EMacs, or the interrelationships of the zillion lines of code in hundreds of files? Yet, millions of ignorant people leverage and apply EMacs to their daily tasks.

Look at what the REA impact is having on all sorts of code bases. The ONE THING that pushed Stallman over the edge and onto his path. The lack of source code to a print driver (or something along those lines).

Well, it’s all Open Source now.

Not only is the source “open”. It can be explained.

“Here is the source tree to EMacs. ELI5 the garbage collector.” “Working…”

It goes both ways. Now everyone has access to a savant to explain software, if that’s what they like.

(You need to pass a test, maintain a license from the government, in many places have proof of passing a maintenance test, pay an annual fee to the government, roads can be closed at will by the government. They can install tolls if they wish etc. In the UK, the police can stop you and search your vehicle without reason and I'm sure that's true in many other countries)

Without FSF, there would have been probably somewhat less open-source data, but certainly not dramatically less.

The README of the project itself explains; "cooked" allocates the pty and interprets dynamically whether the other side is a command-line reader or full-screen program. See: https://github.com/vodik/cooked

More discussion on it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1xren7e/emacs_in_the...

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.

This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....

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.

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.

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)

The friction makes it much slower than agentic coding but it helps me stay in control and it's still faster than before.

So, no.