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.
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.
@bbatsov I'd mainly want to discuss on the basis of the chapter »Do you even need a “power tool” anymore?«.
You write »all of it is in service of making the human more efficient at the mechanical act of coding« — but that's not the point: it's to give the human a faster way to put their thoughts to canvas, thus reducing interruption of those thoughts, and to give them more time to /have/ thoughts.
Put that way, I don't see how LLMs help at all, and frankly, I actually do believe they don't.
@bbatsov You write: »Cursor can scaffold an entire application in an afternoon« — but it can't. It can throw together random existing snippets that look like they might plausibly work, and iterate on them until it compiles and, if it is nothing innovative, might even resemble something you expected too.
Imagine a random PO send you some code with the note »hey, I just made this, can you put it into prod?« — aren't you shuddering? This is just automated script kiddies with even less props.
@Ardubal I don’t think this is as clear cut as you portray it to be. I understand very well how LLMs work and what are the caveats related to their usage, and this doesn't change the fact you can leverage them to produce useful (and good quality code). AI is still just a tool, and the outcomes depend vastly on how you're using the tool. I agree that AI agents can't innovate, but in practice for most tasks you don't really need to innovate anyways.
But I don't really want to discuss AI's role in programming, but the role of Emacs and vim in a world that's increasingly dominated by AI-assisted coding.