I jotted down some thoughts on the future of editors like #Emacs and #Vim in the age of AI https://batsov.com/articles/2026/03/09/emacs-and-vim-in-the-age-of-ai/

I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on the subject as well.

Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra

(think)

@bbatsov I'm worried about the future. AI is getting pretty darn good and I primarily worry what that means for my own wellbeing both when it comes to keeping my job long term, and what it means for keeping my sanity short term. I've only been full on ai-assistedly coding for a few weeks and I feel like my attention span is shrinking and I'm getting more stupid from it.

I have a feeling that an AI-induced problem going forward will be tackled soley by an AI-solutions

@nthcdr @bbatsov well put.

I believe it's a slippery slope: Once you start using AI assistance for coding, you soon become lazy. After a while (half a year? Two years?) you're in practice dependent on AI to do any coding. You cannot code without it. In the beginning, you review each line, are careful you understand, really understand the code AI writes. As time goes on, you let it slip, let it fly. The vibing colleagues and AI agents throws so many PRs at you that you can't possibly review each line. Onwards.

At one point, why bother to review the code at all? Why not have the AI write a bunch of tests and trust that that's good enough? How about vibing some AI agents to scrutiny the code from different angles (security, performance++)? That surely fixes the problem of the annoying feeling that humans should review and understand this, surely?

Then, later, you might ask: why does the language, libraries and frameworks matter if humans are never to understand or touch the code? Why not just go for foolang, since that works the best with AI agents?

My day as a coder consists of 10-30% coding. The rest are meetings, meetings, meetings, emails, reports, code reviews and meeting preparations. I wish AI would help me with the 70-90% of the non-coding work, so that I can do the fun bit. Instead, we're investing SO much money to solve the 10-30% part, so that we can spend that time reviewing the code the bot generated.

As with all challenges at work, I believe the key is to do what Beatles suggested and "get by with a little help from my friends":, i.e. focus on the people you work with and ensure you are in a place where you enjoy the company you're keeping.

@skybert @nthcdr @bbatsov I have coworkers that need to ask Bullshit Generators about ”foo.c:123: Variable bar is uninitialized”
@skybert @nthcdr @bbatsov just today, I got a Bullshit Generated summary of a five minute meeting that took longer to read than the meeting.
@nthcdr @bbatsov don't use it to do the work for you. You should do the work and then ask it for advices and suggestions how to improve it. According to MIT research that showed that people are in fact getting more stupid from using AI it was the only path that showed that people were using brain more than before using AI