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/
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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.
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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'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
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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 Emacs as the text-buffer-based abstraction for personal computing is *amazing* today.
I wrote an MTP TRAMP extension to copy files via dired onto Android devices.
I now have a mise-en-place manager to interactively remove, install, upgrade, ... CLI tools per project and globally.
A PARA filing scheme helper, too, with org agenda integration.
The integrations you listed makes _acting_ on Emacs buffer contents as input from the 'IDE' trivial.
Without it, we'd only have .md files!
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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 Good piece! One minor correction: I think you completely misunderstood the purpose of the Evi fork!
You wrote: "The Vim community recently saw the creation of EVi, a fork of Vim whose entire raison d’etre is to provide a text editor free from AI integration."
I don't think the main goal of the fork is to keep users from integrating AI into their workflows, I think the main purpose is to avoid having LLM-generated code in the editor's source itself. You'll notice that they forked right before the first publicly recognized LLM-generated commit. And it's not like they have added any code that would keep you from using any of the AI integration plugins you describe in the post.
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@bbatsov Good piece! One minor correction: I think you completely misunderstood the purpose of the Evi fork!
You wrote: "The Vim community recently saw the creation of EVi, a fork of Vim whose entire raison d’etre is to provide a text editor free from AI integration."
I don't think the main goal of the fork is to keep users from integrating AI into their workflows, I think the main purpose is to avoid having LLM-generated code in the editor's source itself. You'll notice that they forked right before the first publicly recognized LLM-generated commit. And it's not like they have added any code that would keep you from using any of the AI integration plugins you describe in the post.
@bbatsov Oh, now that I've seen your other post¹, I think I just misunderstood how you use the term "AI integration" and you have the same understanding that I do about why EVi was created. Sorry. But I would posit that your wording is confusing and others are likely to misread it the way I did.
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@bbatsov Oh, now that I've seen your other post¹, I think I just misunderstood how you use the term "AI integration" and you have the same understanding that I do about why EVi was created. Sorry. But I would posit that your wording is confusing and others are likely to misread it the way I did.
@oantolin Yeah, that's a fair point. Poor choice of words on my part - I'll update that.
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@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
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.
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@oantolin Yeah, that's a fair point. Poor choice of words on my part - I'll update that.
@bbatsov @oantolin Hi, I'm the creator of the EVi fork! Not sure what this said originally, but what it says is correct.
"The Vim community recently saw the creation of EVi, a fork of Vim whose entire raison d’etre is to provide a text editor free from AI-assisted (generated?) code contributions."
I hard-forked the last non-AI commit of VIm to make an AI free VIm, no slop code.
As a result, we've been rebranding away from VIm too.
Happy to see EVi get coverage though, so I thank you greatly!
