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Comment by mikebiglan | Hacker News Reader

I used emacs (and dired) for years.

Do you think these could be leveraged for AI development.

Many have moved away from terminals over the years, but Claude Code sure has brought them back into the limelight!

Ultimately, LLMs are a text focused technology (actually tokens). And if you take something like Smalltalk, Acme, Unix Shell (with Vi and other editors), Emacs (as a lisp machine), they are all interfaces that focus on text manipulation. And they all provide the most important capability, defining custom commands on the fly. Some IDEs allows you to define custom tools, but none make it as convenient as the above.

If we take Unix, you could have something in `~/ai/bulletify` which start with:

   #!/usr/bin/env llm-cli
   [prompt text]

And quickly execute it with `:!bulletify` in Vi (with the needed motion). Pretty much the same in emacs, and you can either bind it to have a faster way to invoke it. Most IDEs is about having commonly useful utilities and features bound to the concept of a project. They don't do really well in a very dynamic environment.

And Editors like VS Code and Sublime is very much a basic version of the IDE. They're familiar, but they're not that fluid.

I'm currently (mostly) living in Emacs with a few shell buffers and using gptel to interact with Anthropic, Google, and Open Ai LLMs, as well as running smaller LLMs locally. This is after decades of vi, then vim, then Emacs. Still a neophyte though given the enormity of the Emacs "ecosystem". One critical thing about Emacs: Running an Emacs daemon (for days or weeks between restarts) takes things to an entirely different level. It becomes a useful operating system. The key for me was moving from mutt to mu4e for email. Once I moved my email management into Emacs things improved dramatically, productivity-wise. Oh, and what made me switch to Emacs from Vim in the first place was org-mode.

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