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.
jordanb 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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!
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
I was on a similar project. OTOH it was sad to see so much code devoid of any art or even dignity. OTOH the original overseas coders were just trying to live their life, pay their bills, and giving the middle finger to capitalism. And I got to pay some bills, too.
devsda 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
quixoticelixer- 19 hours ago [-]
It's like a tractor or a chainsaw. There is still just as much need for good engineering, if not more, than before.
krageon 6 hours ago [-]
It's just the low code craze all over again but with different seasoning. It can't work as hyped and it's going to produce a lot of tire fires.
I have trouble believing software engineers that have been in the space for more than five, maybe ten years are seriously convinced of your former point. The latter is of course just a fact (demonstrable and observable in practice), so discussing it also makes no sense.
What I wish would happen is that there was more discussion about things that are actually interesting: in what way is the underlying tech being advanced? Most of the news around this and most of the discussion is about the fiftieth slop software doing something tedious instead of actual novelty. I really enjoyed reading about the early tweaks that for example forced even very simple models to emit correct json based on a schema. It was creative and back then very hard. Why is all this breathless vapid hype so effective on most people?
krige 20 hours ago [-]
> In short, it has the same flaws as humans.
only the clueless, stupid ones
fergie 20 hours ago [-]
I'm wondering- did you read the article? Because you seem to be answering conclusions that it didn't reach.
equites-digital 12 hours ago [-]
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KurSix 18 hours ago [-]
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floro 21 hours ago [-]
Software engineers know that AI code is kind of bad and leads to issues down the road.
Shills and luddites say AI is capable of replacing SWE
sick_of_slop 15 hours ago [-]
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vanviegen 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, great argumentation. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is either a shill or a luddite.
jefurii 1 days ago [-]
> [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.
This will enter the history books as one of the greatest examples of a group of people who appear to love technology inexplicably becoming the most feverishly opposed group against a new technology that happens to replace the craft that they used to claim as their own. Never did they stop to think about the millions of people who lost their jobs because of computers, many because of programs written in emacs. Of all communities, this is the most surprising to me since Lisp was THE AI language for most of its existence, but since it doesn’t happen to be used by the new generation of AI technologies, I suppose AI is now the enemy. This is pathetic. I love emacs and all I can say is that emacs is actually making a comeback for me due to AI since now all I need is a simple text editor that lets me quickly type in some code when I am feeling nostalgic. And let my LLM finish the tedious parts I don’t want to do, thanks to gptel. There are many other LLM related emacs extensions which clearly shows a lot of emacs users are not prudes when it comes to LLM. This post absolutely does not represent my view as an emacs user, and that of most others, to the best of my knowledge.
dmz73 4 hours ago [-]
Computers made a lot of things easier, faster and more reliable until complexity became too great for people to contend with. They also created far more jobs than what they removed.
LLMs are excellent bullshit artists. They can produce large quantity of very plausible output but you just can't trust it and since the volume is so great it is difficult to inspect or understand so it is essentially useless if you want quality.
If you just want quantity, they are great.
fock 1 days ago [-]
good to see treesitter is now vibecoded too...
acedTrex 24 hours ago [-]
Woah since when, that one hurts
mickeyp 22 hours ago [-]
That's obviously the best use of an AI's time.
Have you ever written parsers for complex languages? It is a cumbersome slog.
hahn-kev 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's also super easy to automate testing.
fock 13 hours ago [-]
that's why they then proceeded to stop accepting PRs because of AI-slop. Funny, when the current dev appeared on stage mid 2025...
It seems quite cumbersome that this is, how this is supposed to work now?
fock 22 hours ago [-]
it's on the responsible side of vibecoding. Effectively since a person took over who decided that Claude helps them go brrrr...
The way we are accepting this is extremely unsettling...
bitwize 23 hours ago [-]
Gonna get its milkshake drunk if GNU decides to allow AI.
vconnor 23 hours ago [-]
How could they survive with fewer users and lower revenue?
Ah right, it’s free software. There is no milkshake, only people with similar ideology contributing to a common cause.
vhantz 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
msteffen 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I look for opportunities to replace personal vibe-coded utilities with public projects for this reason.
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.)
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
Isn't there just too much breakage? Projects change all the time, their UIs change, sometimes they even pull the whole rug (e.g. Gnome 3.0).
With vibe coded tools you know what you got, and they're easy to adapt if you need to.
msteffen 4 hours ago [-]
Well, my point is precisely that there’s an alternative to OSS that didn’t used to exist, and it’s pretty compelling, and it will probably keep getting better over time.
Why use OSS then? Because of the community—you will get ideas from using other people’s software that you wouldn’t get from staying in your bubble. OSS projects therefore ought to see themselves as a community first and a software project second. Do other people in the gnome community like the change? Why did the maintainers make it? You have less reason to use gnome than ever, but if you do use gnome 3, you’ll be trying out software that (a) somebody thought was a good idea, and (b) you definitely wouldn’t have vibe-coded for yourself. So that’s something.
jnpnj 1 days ago [-]
There's a principle I can't describe clearly. But one instance of it is the homogenization due to cheap(or free) instantaneous communications. Slow and limited created space and time to share, and incentives to do so because you needed to discuss with others to get or form new knowledge. Now everyone refers to the same source (see the evolution of design, choice of colors). Limits are protective in a way.
billstickers 22 hours ago [-]
A similar principle to that of lower-budget films, where constraints force filmmakers to find creative solutions. Meanwhile, films with seemingly unlimited budgets can somehow end up with bland, homogenised stories and surprisingly poor special effects. Limitations are a catalyst for creativity rather than an obstacle to it.
trashb 13 hours ago [-]
This is a concept that has stuck with me a lot. I believe I first heard it the GDC 2016 Talk from Mark Ferrari. I've come to call it "limitation breeds creativity".
I believe a lot of people will find out with AI that most people don't have very original ideas. And that the limitations we encounter while realizing those ideas enable us to grow it into a good art piece or product. Due to being forced to consider if the effort of working around the limitations is worth it. And then put in the effort to realize something that approaches the initial idea as close as possible. Instead of instantly being able to realize the first idea in you mind without any obstacles.
scruple 1 days ago [-]
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dkarl 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
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.
0x445442 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I view the ability to fork and to keep as much as you want in synch as the purest form of free and open. Some people are just after utility and don't wish to be involved in a "community" and all that entails.
Github has the forks link for easy navigation to other spins. If core won't except contributions for whatever reason let the marketplace decide what is useful. Let a thousand flowers bloom I say.
sublinear 22 hours ago [-]
> If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?
Writing code shouldn't merely be about accomplishing a goal, but making deliberate and good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity. It's no different than any other type of planning, engineering, or architecting. FOSS demands this more than any other genre of software because it's made collaboratively.
I think AI is just too irresistible for the reckless and dumb developers who were, unfortunately, always the majority in our line of work. Now we don't have to guess at that fact anymore or be afraid of being judged as arrogant for saying it. Now we know. These developers don't bring anything to the table. The problem of rejecting garbage PRs is far from new.
dkarl 14 hours ago [-]
This sounds pointlessly elitist to me. Those "dumb" developers can do a fine job of solving a problem well enough for a limited context, which is what they're paid for. If we limited ourselves to software that emerged from "good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity," then we wouldn't have much software at all. Your doctor's office would still run on paper files.
But who knows, maybe AI will get good enough to meet your standards even though most humans don't.
sublinear 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not talking about paid work.
Not every project has to be "elitist", but if the whole point is to do the best work to serve a particular use case you can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the best work has to be done.
If an overreliance on AI is ultimately deferring decision making and responsibility, then AI is then just a threat vector for yet more ideological battles that were already muddying waters.
Ideally it doesn't matter how the best work is done, but it seems that banning AI is a very effective filter.
For all the headlines about AI finding bugs, we never celebrate all the times it didn't because a human wrote excellent code. It is human will determining how to classify and fix them. AI training data is only ever as smart and fresh as the continued human engagement with it. It's trivially easy to see now that many models are going stale and maintenance is very expensive. Even if it was cheap, the fundamental problems don't go away.
jshaqaw 13 hours ago [-]
Good point. So many software things I thought I really wanted. Now that they are a few days of AI chats away I realize I don’t really want them very much.
ssivark 24 hours ago [-]
> 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
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).
bloopernova 20 hours ago [-]
Neomacs is about 95% complete it seems. I just ran it and it used my init.el* just fine. There are still significant bugs, and if I had spare tokens I'd probably contribute some towards it.
* probably yak shaved and far too much for what I use it for
evalexec 19 hours ago [-]
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russfink 1 days ago [-]
“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.”
whartung 1 days ago [-]
Nobody knows how Stallman, or anyone else, works either. But folks don’t need to understand how he works to understand, say, EMacs.
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.
Diti 21 hours ago [-]
A savant who confabulates about 10 % of the time, per the best benchmarks, no matter how much “thinking” it does (GPT-based LLMs will always “hallucinate”)? How do you trust it?
I would rather take the time to ask the same question to the Emacs contributors mailing-list, who have the incentive to check their posts for mistakes.
orbital-decay 19 hours ago [-]
Have you ever worked with a modern agent? They let many weak assumptions slip because their cognitive functions aren't remotely as deep as human's (that's what makes their code a horror), but they have also been trained to hyperfocus on verifying and grounding everything they do and say, you have to actively stop them from doing so when it's unnecessary. This not what I can call confabulation in any good faith, let alone 10% of the time. I think you've been misled by the old paper you cite below, it doesn't say what you likely think it says.
Diti 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, I mainly work with OpenCode, with GLM as an orchestrator agent and DeepSeek Flash as a worker agent. I’m assuming it’s modern? I don’t have the money to use either Fable or Astra, but my assumption is that the few more points they get on the benchmarks still don’t make up for the wild confabulated things they do in my projects.
orbital-decay 18 hours ago [-]
Both are fine, though frontier models are more persistent. They mostly take unwarranted shortcuts, trying to find the easiest way to reach the literal goal set by you, failing to see the broader picture. But they definitely do not confabulate, as in they don't just make up nonexistent things, they would rather walk extra mile to verify when they're not certain, which is the reason the software they make is trash but it works in the narrow sense. They can be rigid in their writing style due to mode collapse, but I haven't seen this leading to them inventing nonexistent functions or anything like that in a long while (and it's a job for formal tools to catch that, in any case).
Modern LLMs are very far from being next token predictors trained only on text. Text and other modalities is the base that makes them understand your language and have concepts similar to yours, but they were also subjected to RL that makes them good at reaching the goals. Two tricks in a trenchcoat instead of just one.
svieira 16 hours ago [-]
> But they definitely do not confabulate, as in they don't just make up nonexistent things
I've definitely seen both Labs' "best" stuff confabulate to this day.
NateEag 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed.
The harnesses / RLHF do a good job of prioritizing mechanisms to check results, which works out pretty well pragmatically for programming.
Nonetheless, I see Opus 5.5 spew out false information daily (never mind its code's unreadability).
I can't speak to Fable or Astra, because my employers, while threatening to fire us if we don't use the bullshit bots, have also refused to light the barrels of cash on fire that are required for those models.
As far as I can see, their fundamental nature has not changed, and truth is not something they have access to - just the called tool's exit code.
noosphr 19 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for the other providers but Gemini carbon feels like the difference between gpt3 and gpt5 when compared to Chinese open models.
brabel 21 hours ago [-]
How do you trust a human? Are humans infallible, or at least better than AI at explaining things? I known my answer.
Diti 21 hours ago [-]
I trust the Emacs contributors, the actual experts in the topic, to fact-check their own answers, because they are incentivized for doing so (reputation). They are also able to tell when they aren’t sure about a particular topic.
Obviously the answer is to stop relying on trust entirely, and just proceed directly to verification.
demo4567 1 days ago [-]
You don't understand Stallman then. Now you are dependent on closed source from closed source AI vendors. True software freedom would then being able to dissassemble the bot writing your code.
totetsu 1 days ago [-]
It's clear that without hardware freedom, even if we disassemble the bot, the means to run it can still be controlled by hardware vendors. We need our own means to make the substrate for the intelligence too. But the problem is, as long as the manufacturing process is impossibly complex, and relies on minerals extracted all around the world, requiring complex supply chains, its beyond any local group of people to do themselves. What we need is a way of creating substrate for open intelligence just form the materials and resources that are available to any human, and then the freedom to train it to behaving in a way that alignes with our own values and local situation. But the problem with OSS adoption, is that its a real chore for normal people to set up and use it, so we need to make this process of creating our own intelegence host as fun as possible, to encourage people to do it..
quertyrecord74 20 hours ago [-]
This. Nailed it. This right here is the core issue. Thanks for writing.
Kerrick 12 hours ago [-]
> What we need is a way of creating substrate for open intelligence just form the materials and resources that are available to any human, and then the freedom to train it to behaving in a way that alignes with our own values and local situation.
I can't tell if you're being cheeky, but... you're describing human child-rearing. From food and water and two humans, substrate can be created, and parents, schools, and other community resources help to train and align.
pitkali 1 days ago [-]
Even if the model was open source, nobody would still know how the generated code works. You wouldn't even really know in want interesting sense of the word why the model produced the output you got.
bloppe 1 days ago [-]
Open source really should mean open training dataset, not merely open weights. There are some truly open source models and you can reproduce their training process if you have the compute. I can't think of a reason why those kinds of models would be incompatible with Stallmanism. Presumably they will get better and more widespread over time, like free software
Actually, this one also excludes nonfree data from the training set; there are probably more capable models that include downloadable nonfree data. I'm not sure if the dataset also needs to be free in order for the model to be considered free.
opan 1 days ago [-]
LLMs are even more proprietary than regular proprietary software, I think you've got it right here. They are destroying the free software movement and it seems like most people don't even realize what's happening.
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
LLMs are a fundamentally different category of thing to software. Developing them is closer to breeding cows than writing code.
thunderpaper 1 days ago [-]
I definitely agree on this. You don't program an LLM and thus come to an understanding of what it does in the same way you do for a compiler, an operating system, a game engine, a CRUD app, or a web front-end.
Something that's the output of mass-effort machine learning algorithms is categorically different to human-made-and-understandable software. Do we have terms for these different categories?
Gormo 11 hours ago [-]
> You don't program an LLM
For now. But it may well become common practice to construct weights directly, or at least to directly adjust weights in trained models, rather than exlcusively train them from prior datasets.
0c3ca83 13 hours ago [-]
Software and slop.
thunderpaper 1 days ago [-]
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0c3ca83 1 days ago [-]
The damage isn't restricted to software. AI is the intellectual equivalent of asbestos.
Asbestos is an amazing fire retardant. That's why nearly every building built before we knew how cancerous it was contains it.
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
No one knows how the open source models work either.
coldtea 1 days ago [-]
"Being dependent on a small number of AI vendors, who also penetrate every aspect of your life to control, report, and spy upon you, forced to use AI at work or be laid off, or just be made redundant and let off anyway, while drowing in slop from every corner of social media, news, youtube, search results, and any other cultural production -- that's real freedom!"
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
A freedom that only works as long there is an AI model one is able to reach for, with stolen data from the whole known universe.
gib444 16 hours ago [-]
I bet that person thinks driving a car is real freedom too.
(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)
Barrin92 1 days ago [-]
I'm also not sure how that ended up the definition of real freedom. Maybe some Spinoza is in order but genuine freedom is proper understanding of one's own, and others, nature and causes. That is to say one is free to the extent that one has adequate knowledge.
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
stalfie 1 days ago [-]
I would guess that for most people AI still promotes this definition of freedom.
The modern world is too complex for anyone to understand all topics fully. So as a result of this cognitive cap, by Spinoza's definition people have grown progressively less free for centuries. AI can, for anyone who seeks it, allow easy access to fields where they previously would have to consult with a human expert in order to begin to understand. Coding agents arguably make coding more accessible then it's ever been, it's just that as a side effect they make understanding less necessary to produce software (and thus also less valuable). Any schmuck can now ask an agent "hey how does this program work" and get a competent answer in terms they can parse. Of course, most people do not do this. Human beings, as a general rule, do not do things they don't have to. But the option is there.
As a board saturated with experts, people here on HN don't tend to appreciate what kind of incredible super power vibe coding is for people who did not pursue an education and career in software engineering. Everything that a computer can do is now accessible to everyone. As the vast majority of people on earth would not and could not spend the time and effort to understand software (or simply don't have the talent to do so), this is a pure upgrade in terms of average freedom.
bsoles 1 days ago [-]
Other ones being to keep paying the AI bros in perpetuity, and having all your prompts, data, and IP getting stolen by the same people with the goal of eventually undermining your own ability to think. We will all be as free as the people living in Pods in Matrix.
merelydev 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
brabel 21 hours ago [-]
I don’t find that ironic. As the post says, AI gives people the ultimate freedom to materialize Stallmans world where everyone can modify the software they use any way they want. The fact that his movement helped that become a reality seems the opposite of irony.
piekvorst 15 hours ago [-]
> Without Stallman there will be no vibe coding.
Without FSF, there would have been probably somewhat less open-source data, but certainly not dramatically less.
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
I think I would kind of like the alternative timeline where BSD had won instead of Linux.
Gormo 10 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm not seeing how either of these things are irony.
Animats 1 days ago [-]
It'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.
0xb0565e486 1 days ago [-]
Strong isolation where it matters, completely free otherwise.
globular-toast 1 days ago [-]
Isn't that just... software engineering?
bitwize 1 days ago [-]
No, it's:
⟩ Refactor these components into standalone modules that communicate across well-defined APIs. Write the API specifications to docs/API.md. Add a note to AGENTS.md instructing agents to preserve the modular seams and focus work on one module at a time.
Buttons840 23 hours ago [-]
It's a weird world where we're refactoring everything, but not just using a type system that can enforce those seams and limitations at compile time.
q4y2u35uk 22 hours ago [-]
We are though. Why do you think Rust has become the defacto standard for vibe-coding? Most vibe coders can't read a line of Rust, but the strong ML-inspired type system, and also having native performance, is why it is the king of the hill right now.
throwaway27448 1 days ago [-]
"Just"?
ggcr 1 days ago [-]
> 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
piker 1 days ago [-]
Loved 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.
danielvaughn 1 days ago [-]
"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.
adamddev1 1 days ago [-]
> "I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important."
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.
Schlagbohrer 19 hours ago [-]
"rock solid, snappy apps"
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.
skydhash 16 hours ago [-]
i used a ton of good apps on windows xp and 7 (sumatrapdf, codeblocks, notepad++,…), macos (things, bear.app, cleanshot,…) and Linux. But that was a bit before SaaS and their electron clients. Now I still maintain a lean desktop, but it’s mostly standalone software with no reliance on the “cloud”.
bitwize 17 hours ago [-]
We used to have them—in the 2000s and before. These days not so much, but there appears to be a correlation between the push to use LLMs and a hockey stick in the enshittification curve.
rootnod3 19 hours ago [-]
Same. That is why I am over in a corner happily coding away with Common Lisp and McCLIM to write myself an editor that mixes ACME UI with Lisp. Is it ultra-polished? Hell no. But it definitely keeps me sane and I know what I wrote.
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
Nice, Acme is underrated and needs more experimentation/adaptation as a concept.
danielvaughn 1 days ago [-]
I understand the sentiment. I do think it's important to experience it for yourself - not to convince you (I'm less and less convinced as the months go by) - but just to understand the visceral feeling that leads people into AI psychosis.
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.
adamddev1 1 days ago [-]
I read about a guy who was doing a documentary about crack addicts. They told him he needed to try it once to understand. He did. He then got addicted, lost everything and spent years on the street. Years later he finally got sober and finished the documentary.
bloopernova 20 hours ago [-]
> 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")
wtetzner 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
I get where you're coming from, but this metaphor doesn't really land for me. I find driving to be far more stressful than walking, and therefore higher friction than walking.
But your point still stands.
kragen 1 days ago [-]
> The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.
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.
coldtea 1 days ago [-]
>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.
Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.
fock 1 days ago [-]
and we'll see how that plays out. The way I loom at the chains of "AI" adds feature and feature needs 5 extra PRs over a year to fix it, I think this will be fun!
stonekyx 14 hours ago [-]
Fun 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.
spapas82 1 days ago [-]
I more or less agree with the article but we can move it one step further. Nowadays we don't even need text editors no matter how advanced they are. I am a VS Code user and I have not opened VS Code in more than 3 months because I don't need it anymore. Opening a text editor and editing code by hand seems like so ... yesterday.
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.)
johanvts 1 days ago [-]
Emacs is not an advanced text editor, it's more like an OS. I run Claude Code inside emacs (with the claude-code-ide package). I seriously think LLMs will usher in a new golden era for emacs because you can now reap all the benefits without having to learn elisp.
pmontra 1 days ago [-]
I did, with another package, but running Claude inside a terminal has no glitches and I seldom have to edit code anymore. I'm using emacs almost only to edit md files in which I make Claude write analysis and plans. I make changes, add clarifications, we iterate. Most of the times the chat is enough. I remember that I discovered that I broke Ruby autocompletion only weeks after I did (I investigated the cause.) Maybe notepad would be enough but I stick to emacs. I am about to get to 40 years of marriage with it.
0c3ca83 1 days ago [-]
Yeah. AIs let you exist without learning. A great advance for the brainless.
q4y2u35uk 22 hours ago [-]
If everyone is just vibe coding elisp, who is left to learn it deeply and push it forward as a language and ecosystem? Or is AI just going to do that too. Very unfortunate world we live in
niceguy1827 37 minutes ago [-]
Who cares? Do you know how a carburetor works?
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
AIs will also assist you with any learning you want to do.
0c3ca83 5 hours ago [-]
They'll sabotage you while you fool yourself into thinking you're learning.
Again, a great advance for the brainless.
taude 1 days ago [-]
I was saying almost this same thing to a coworker. I'm building something that's like Emacs, but for agents, and it's mostly a Markdown-forward tool for managing all the agents and agent coding harnesses, and it's a vendor-agnostic things....If anything it's like a newer, faster, fancier org-mode, but knows how to inject all the right context into all the agentic projects.
This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
bloopernova 20 hours ago [-]
LLM-assisted development really is like Literate Programming. I haven't used LP in a while, but I wonder how useful that workflow would be now. Almost like the reverse of LP, lots of agent work punctuated with smaller bursts of human-created text.
so-cal-schemer 6 hours ago [-]
Yep. But I wouldn't say "the reverse", you were always supposed to document first, or write code and comments simultaneously while weaving them together.
BeetleB 1 days ago [-]
I mostly use Emacs not to write code, though. In fact, getting Claude to do explorations for me and output its findings as org docs is fantastic.
samesame 14 hours ago [-]
yeah, I was about to mention I mostly use emacs for switching between projects and exploring codebases and I'm not aware of a better way to do this that actually gives you a sense of how the code is structured. Text editors might be irrelevant for the people who are not reading the code anymore, I guess, but that's not me.
shrubble 22 hours ago [-]
There is, in terminal usage and programming lingo, "raw terminal mode" and "cooked mode" ; not seeing the original discussion linked, I do wonder if "cooked" was used in both meanings of the word and not just 1.
jbotz 21 hours ago [-]
It's clearly in that sense that it's called "cooked". Which other meaning do you think applies?
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
Sadly I moved away from Emacs as my daily driver and I just orchestrate agents in tools I build. Emacs will have a lasting impact on me and I will probably be back somehow.
iLemming 11 hours ago [-]
I'm using Emacs more than ever. Although, mainly not for code composition - most of the IDE features of Emacs - lsp, formatters, checkers, etc. - I'm not using them much anymore. Yet my usage on the text consumption side has increased - I'm reading a lot more stuff directly in Emacs.
The age of LLMs is forcing me to review bigger bodies of text, and more often. Various features of Emacs, like indirect buffers, narrowing, ibuffer, a multitude of search options, etc., make it an unbeatable choice. Plain-text composition is also at its peak, and Emacs, again, is just beyond anything else with completion-preview, thesauri, etymology and definition lookup, dictionary and translation, and fantastic agentic integration - I can query a model in the middle of typing this very comment, for various tasks - I can either just ask it to look up something, or feed the selected text to correct mistakes (with various diffing options to compare the result), fact-check things, ask it to TLDR or explain something, or even change any aspect of Emacs itself, right there, without missing a beat, without ever restarting anything. The flexibility totally is at complete and utter bananas level.
LLMs are all about text. Emacs is still the uncontested king in this space. Who knew that the 50-year-old turtle, after all, would take a major lead, surpassing even the fastest rabbits? I'm so glad I spent a decade falling in love with the idea of a Lisp-based editor and ignored all the cries about Lisp's imminent demise - I'm witnessing its renaissance; it's happening right in front of my eyes.
jan_m_savage 15 hours ago [-]
I even re-designed my book review site to Emacs style: dersavage.github.io/fiction
rurban 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I really need to let AI write more useful elisp bits for daily life. Like a magit commit message writer, esp. the GNU Changelogs. And much more such thinks.
everybodyknows 1 days ago [-]
> sealed up transistors can reproduce the same outputs given the same inputs
with unerring precision. The power to unambiguously differentiate an
on- versus an off-signal -- the binary "digital" -- might seem
trivial, but is 100% the reason why we're so comfortable handing over
the reins to computers.
Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
atrus 1 days ago [-]
I'm glad I'm not the only one who see this comment a lot, and hates it. Computers are only "deterministic" because they have about 47 layers of error correction between you and reality.
skydhash 1 days ago [-]
> Whither now, we ask -- now that we have, even to my
jaded eye, a god machine that makes short work of all the stuff we
emacsers believed we were faster at than people using lesser tools.
Editing speed, customization, the expressiveness of LISP: every
advantage we claimed vanished the moment we stopped typing and started
telling the AI what we wanted.
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.
rgoulter 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I think framing in terms of 'effort' or 'flow' might make more sense than 'speed' here.
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.
thunderpaper 1 days ago [-]
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mark_l_watson 19 hours ago [-]
Great read, thanks.
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.
anthk 1 days ago [-]
>ut at the time, rules-based
programming was still novel enough to be considered a viable approach
to AI.
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".
iLemming 1 days ago [-]
> Neomacs crashes a lot
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.
anthk 1 days ago [-]
Obvious. Clueless vibecoding creates disasters.
iLemming 11 hours ago [-]
That's unfair; Emacs had 50 years of shaping into what it is. What the Neomacs team achieved in a very short amount of time is absolutely impressive. I'm not stoked about the fragmentation or about the use of AI, but I think we all should curb our skepticism too; some opinions are aging faster than milk.
rurban 16 hours ago [-]
It should have be written in a memory safe language instead.
evalexec 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
evalexec 19 hours ago [-]
> hit menu with the mouse
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)
anthk 5 hours ago [-]
Linux/Wayland.
vkgcr 20 hours ago [-]
This reads like someone getting AI psychosis from building one-shot prototypes. Many such cases.
globular-toast 1 days ago [-]
> 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 only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.
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.
plant-ian 1 days ago [-]
Oh they __WANT__ you to have it... but you gotta $$$ for it... every month. Anything your imagination can think up... just put your card # in... that's American freedom!
globular-toast 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly, renting isn't freedom.
so-cal-schemer 16 hours ago [-]
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight,
but now everyone's just sending a drone."
smitty1e 1 days ago [-]
I'm still not using AI to do more than get me in the door with finding new features, like: "tell me how to get my matplotlib output into tiff".
The AI tooling seems too unstable still.
jobigoud 15 hours ago [-]
I use it mostly as a personal StackOverflow. I describe my issue as best as I can and get answers/suggestions, sometimes a code snippet that I check and paste over, but often still writing my own code or rewriting the snippet so much that it's as if I wrote it in the first place.
The friction makes it much slower than agentic coding but it helps me stay in control and it's still faster than before.
lettergram 1 days ago [-]
Here's a fun question - if AI is trained on OSS, particularly with licenses that are copy left... wouldn't that make all the code it generates copy left? wouldn't that mean the weights themselves should all be open sourced.
coldtea 1 days ago [-]
Only if the lawmakers and courts side with the way less powerful FOSS side in interpreting the impact of those licenses on the derivative LLM code.
So, no.
lettergram 1 days ago [-]
Well, politically, if AI is seen as threatening, they'll see siding with FOSS as beneficial.
coldtea 16 hours ago [-]
Threatening to whom? Politicians are in the pockets of the same billionares controlling AI. And even if they weren't, AI is useful to them for controlling everything.
hobo123 11 hours ago [-]
Once you have read enough copyleft code, will you only produce copyleft code from now on?
KurSix 18 hours ago [-]
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trail_green36 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
minimaxa 1 days ago [-]
Is it too much to ask to format your text in the middle aligned?
Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.
HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.
brabel 21 hours ago [-]
Read the article in emacs. Looks great as it’s plain text.
sorrywhat 20 hours ago [-]
It's a txt file. If you don't know what that is, it's bit like a markdown file, but without the emojis and bullet points. If you can't consume a txt file, that's a failing on your part.
Gormo 10 hours ago [-]
Sorry, you're saying that middle-aligned, i.e. centered text is sensible to you, but traditional left-aligned formatting, as seen in almost all written works published in the last several centuries, is avant-garde to you? What?
q4y2u35uk 22 hours ago [-]
Well browsers can't format plaintext. Better question why is he serving plaintext documents on the web in the 21st century?
iLemming 5 hours ago [-]
no banners, no ads, no gify-gifs, and no modal windows popping up randomly; how disgusting, amiright?
q4y2u35uk 4 hours ago [-]
Same holds true for HTML, the quite popular web format that features cutting edge technology like <p style="text-align: center">.
imp0cat 22 hours ago [-]
So text files are considered avant-garde now?
noosphr 1 days ago [-]
The whole idea of free software seems quaint.
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.
bitwize 1 days ago [-]
Fable 5.2 is designing entire devices now, from PCB layout to case assembly.
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.
piker 1 days ago [-]
> join the ownership class
...which is rapidly running away from you. Ignore this nonsense and do useful work. It will be okay.
lopotubez 1 days ago [-]
This is such a wrong way of looking at it. The fact that AI is getting better and giving us better toolings is more of a reason to go and get an education.
bitwize 1 days ago [-]
AI is not a tool. It's a service.
Tools are an extension of your mind. AI is becoming like unto a mind of its own. It's taking the power to make decisions away, rather than speeding your execution on such decisions. Note that by "decisions" I don't mean just higher-level decisions, but the micro-decisions about details that go into crafting a thing also. And we're being told oh, just accept this new layer of abstraction (on top of all the others). And don't worry about the details anymore, the machine does them so much better. I mean, sure you can work at a detailed level with an LLM, but on the job they'll PIP you for not just trusting the dark factory. Judgement is the new moat. Wait, Opus 5.5 is pretty good at that too; business context is the new new moat. It's just an upward retreat into fewer and fewer, less and less concrete decisions made by people, until engineering simply isn't done by people anymore; there's only a need for human business people, product managers, and QA testers. And then AI starts coming for their jobs too, especially since the CEO has been using ChatGPT to do product-market fit analysis for what potential things we might ship to maximize profitability over the next FY...
As for university, I actually don't really know what to tell kids these days. Many of them will succumb to pressure to keep their GPA up, and use AI to cheat to ensure that they do. So whatever they choose, unless they are super disciplined, super honest, and super incentivized to come by their degree without cheating, they won't get a whole lot of learning out of it. Especially not for the money they're spending now.
b-man 1 days ago [-]
> If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude
I hope you are not advising any young people out there.
Rendered at 04:23:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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!
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.
I have trouble believing software engineers that have been in the space for more than five, maybe ten years are seriously convinced of your former point. The latter is of course just a fact (demonstrable and observable in practice), so discussing it also makes no sense.
What I wish would happen is that there was more discussion about things that are actually interesting: in what way is the underlying tech being advanced? Most of the news around this and most of the discussion is about the fiftieth slop software doing something tedious instead of actual novelty. I really enjoyed reading about the early tweaks that for example forced even very simple models to emit correct json based on a schema. It was creative and back then very hard. Why is all this breathless vapid hype so effective on most people?
only the clueless, stupid ones
Shills and luddites say AI is capable of replacing SWE
https://human-emacs.org/
Have you ever written parsers for complex languages? It is a cumbersome slog.
It seems quite cumbersome that this is, how this is supposed to work now?
The way we are accepting this is extremely unsettling...
Ah right, it’s free software. There is no milkshake, only people with similar ideology contributing to a common cause.
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.
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.)
With vibe coded tools you know what you got, and they're easy to adapt if you need to.
Why use OSS then? Because of the community—you will get ideas from using other people’s software that you wouldn’t get from staying in your bubble. OSS projects therefore ought to see themselves as a community first and a software project second. Do other people in the gnome community like the change? Why did the maintainers make it? You have less reason to use gnome than ever, but if you do use gnome 3, you’ll be trying out software that (a) somebody thought was a good idea, and (b) you definitely wouldn’t have vibe-coded for yourself. So that’s something.
I believe a lot of people will find out with AI that most people don't have very original ideas. And that the limitations we encounter while realizing those ideas enable us to grow it into a good art piece or product. Due to being forced to consider if the effort of working around the limitations is worth it. And then put in the effort to realize something that approaches the initial idea as close as possible. Instead of instantly being able to realize the first idea in you mind without any obstacles.
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.
Github has the forks link for easy navigation to other spins. If core won't except contributions for whatever reason let the marketplace decide what is useful. Let a thousand flowers bloom I say.
Writing code shouldn't merely be about accomplishing a goal, but making deliberate and good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity. It's no different than any other type of planning, engineering, or architecting. FOSS demands this more than any other genre of software because it's made collaboratively.
I think AI is just too irresistible for the reckless and dumb developers who were, unfortunately, always the majority in our line of work. Now we don't have to guess at that fact anymore or be afraid of being judged as arrogant for saying it. Now we know. These developers don't bring anything to the table. The problem of rejecting garbage PRs is far from new.
But who knows, maybe AI will get good enough to meet your standards even though most humans don't.
Not every project has to be "elitist", but if the whole point is to do the best work to serve a particular use case you can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the best work has to be done.
If an overreliance on AI is ultimately deferring decision making and responsibility, then AI is then just a threat vector for yet more ideological battles that were already muddying waters.
Ideally it doesn't matter how the best work is done, but it seems that banning AI is a very effective filter.
For all the headlines about AI finding bugs, we never celebrate all the times it didn't because a human wrote excellent code. It is human will determining how to classify and fix them. AI training data is only ever as smart and fresh as the continued human engagement with it. It's trivially easy to see now that many models are going stale and maintenance is very expensive. Even if it was cheap, the fundamental problems don't go away.
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).
* probably yak shaved and far too much for what I use it for
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.
I would rather take the time to ask the same question to the Emacs contributors mailing-list, who have the incentive to check their posts for mistakes.
Modern LLMs are very far from being next token predictors trained only on text. Text and other modalities is the base that makes them understand your language and have concepts similar to yours, but they were also subjected to RL that makes them good at reaching the goals. Two tricks in a trenchcoat instead of just one.
I've definitely seen both Labs' "best" stuff confabulate to this day.
The harnesses / RLHF do a good job of prioritizing mechanisms to check results, which works out pretty well pragmatically for programming.
Nonetheless, I see Opus 5.5 spew out false information daily (never mind its code's unreadability).
I can't speak to Fable or Astra, because my employers, while threatening to fire us if we don't use the bullshit bots, have also refused to light the barrels of cash on fire that are required for those models.
As far as I can see, their fundamental nature has not changed, and truth is not something they have access to - just the called tool's exit code.
GPT-based LLMs, by design, cannot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746
Obviously the answer is to stop relying on trust entirely, and just proceed directly to verification.
I can't tell if you're being cheeky, but... you're describing human child-rearing. From food and water and two humans, substrate can be created, and parents, schools, and other community resources help to train and align.
Actually, this one also excludes nonfree data from the training set; there are probably more capable models that include downloadable nonfree data. I'm not sure if the dataset also needs to be free in order for the model to be considered free.
Something that's the output of mass-effort machine learning algorithms is categorically different to human-made-and-understandable software. Do we have terms for these different categories?
For now. But it may well become common practice to construct weights directly, or at least to directly adjust weights in trained models, rather than exlcusively train them from prior datasets.
Asbestos is an amazing fire retardant. That's why nearly every building built before we knew how cancerous it was contains it.
(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)
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
The modern world is too complex for anyone to understand all topics fully. So as a result of this cognitive cap, by Spinoza's definition people have grown progressively less free for centuries. AI can, for anyone who seeks it, allow easy access to fields where they previously would have to consult with a human expert in order to begin to understand. Coding agents arguably make coding more accessible then it's ever been, it's just that as a side effect they make understanding less necessary to produce software (and thus also less valuable). Any schmuck can now ask an agent "hey how does this program work" and get a competent answer in terms they can parse. Of course, most people do not do this. Human beings, as a general rule, do not do things they don't have to. But the option is there.
As a board saturated with experts, people here on HN don't tend to appreciate what kind of incredible super power vibe coding is for people who did not pursue an education and career in software engineering. Everything that a computer can do is now accessible to everyone. As the vast majority of people on earth would not and could not spend the time and effort to understand software (or simply don't have the talent to do so), this is a pure upgrade in terms of average 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.
Without FSF, there would have been probably somewhat less open-source data, but certainly not dramatically less.
We need to be thinking about modularity with well-defined APIs now, to isolate the chunks created by AI coding. Maintainabilty requires firewalls.
⟩ Refactor these components into standalone modules that communicate across well-defined APIs. Write the API specifications to docs/API.md. Add a note to AGENTS.md instructing agents to preserve the modular seams and focus work on one module at a time.
bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI
> 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.
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 get where you're coming from, but this metaphor doesn't really land for me. I find driving to be far more stressful than walking, and therefore higher friction than walking.
But your point still stands.
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.
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.
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.)
Again, a great advance for the brainless.
This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
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
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/cooked
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cooked
More discussion on it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1xren7e/emacs_in_the...
The age of LLMs is forcing me to review bigger bodies of text, and more often. Various features of Emacs, like indirect buffers, narrowing, ibuffer, a multitude of search options, etc., make it an unbeatable choice. Plain-text composition is also at its peak, and Emacs, again, is just beyond anything else with completion-preview, thesauri, etymology and definition lookup, dictionary and translation, and fantastic agentic integration - I can query a model in the middle of typing this very comment, for various tasks - I can either just ask it to look up something, or feed the selected text to correct mistakes (with various diffing options to compare the result), fact-check things, ask it to TLDR or explain something, or even change any aspect of Emacs itself, right there, without missing a beat, without ever restarting anything. The flexibility totally is at complete and utter bananas level.
LLMs are all about text. Emacs is still the uncontested king in this space. Who knew that the 50-year-old turtle, after all, would take a major lead, surpassing even the fastest rabbits? I'm so glad I spent a decade falling in love with the idea of a Lisp-based editor and ignored all the cries about Lisp's imminent demise - I'm witnessing its renaissance; it's happening right in front of my eyes.
Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
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.
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.
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".
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)
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.
but now everyone's just sending a drone."
The AI tooling seems too unstable still.
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.
Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.
HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.
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.
...which is rapidly running away from you. Ignore this nonsense and do useful work. It will be okay.
Tools are an extension of your mind. AI is becoming like unto a mind of its own. It's taking the power to make decisions away, rather than speeding your execution on such decisions. Note that by "decisions" I don't mean just higher-level decisions, but the micro-decisions about details that go into crafting a thing also. And we're being told oh, just accept this new layer of abstraction (on top of all the others). And don't worry about the details anymore, the machine does them so much better. I mean, sure you can work at a detailed level with an LLM, but on the job they'll PIP you for not just trusting the dark factory. Judgement is the new moat. Wait, Opus 5.5 is pretty good at that too; business context is the new new moat. It's just an upward retreat into fewer and fewer, less and less concrete decisions made by people, until engineering simply isn't done by people anymore; there's only a need for human business people, product managers, and QA testers. And then AI starts coming for their jobs too, especially since the CEO has been using ChatGPT to do product-market fit analysis for what potential things we might ship to maximize profitability over the next FY...
As for university, I actually don't really know what to tell kids these days. Many of them will succumb to pressure to keep their GPA up, and use AI to cheat to ensure that they do. So whatever they choose, unless they are super disciplined, super honest, and super incentivized to come by their degree without cheating, they won't get a whole lot of learning out of it. Especially not for the money they're spending now.
I hope you are not advising any young people out there.