A Eulogy for Vim
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
Lord forbid if people disagree with you. I know Drew's vibe is always "I'm right because I'm the only one with the correct opinions", but it does get tiring after a while.
Not to say AI isn't having huge drawbacks being introduced, and aren't exactly worry-free, but why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?" so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?
Would be very different from say:
> I'd like to understand people who don't see it the same way as me, that it's mostly awful and not good.
Or similar, rather than "I'm right, everyone else don't understand it properly". Very HN-esque, but oh so tiring after 100s of articles in the exactly same vein from the same author.
Drew is correct, the impact of generative "AI" on society is overwhelmingly negative.
It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious? Just fuels the whole "holier than thou" vibe Drew been trying to increase seemingly every day.
It's a disagreement of opinion, not some "I'm the only smart person who can realize this", which is why it kind of sours the entire piece.
I'll say this from the perspective of a person who publishes content online: because people's revealed preference is for content written this way. You can spend weeks polishing thoughtful, original content that will get few clicks, or you can crank out throwaway op-eds about AI and get thousands of likes and upvotes from people who just wanted to hear their own beliefs explained back to them.
My stuff appeared on HN a couple of times over the years and the less effort I put into it, the better it fared. The temptation to change your writing style and to offer increasingly more provocative and shallow opinions is difficult to resist.
My point is probably this: if you want to see better stuff, I think you gotta stop engaging with articles like this. Patrol /newest and upvote cool in-depth stuff.
That's not the tone of the article; he uses the word "pretending". That tells me that he thinks that people do understand, but they don't want to admit that they understand because that would reveal their values.
I would insist that the deployments of a technology should be disconnected from the technology itself - I criticize AI too, and I get a lot of downvotes for it, but I try to separate the science of AI from its economics and politics.
The harms of AI and other technologies come from two sources 1. Capital destroying market bubbles and 2. Deployments motivated and enabled by political and moral corruption.
Both of these are in turn enabled and sustained by legislation. That is, we have to talk politics, not technology and not AI. AI has a great potential - both for improving human life and for making it a lot worse and which way it goes depends entirely on politics.
If we fail to cleanly separate these issues and keep moralizing about technology, we will be chasing red herrings and bumping heads in the dark all the while the tech is being deployed against us.
I feel that the people who are completely ignoring the harms are the ones who need and/or benefit from it and do whatever it takes to justify their use of it. The rest are people who understand the harms and minimize interaction followed by the blissfully ignorant.
I was just talking to a content creator who uses AI at work social media platforms to display her personal projects. She talked about how she is fully aware of the harm social media platforms bring while acknowledging they empower her to present her work to the world without gatekeeping. AI allows her to power through boring office tasks but she loathes their use in the art world and replacing people in general.
This is too shallow of a take. Especially when your very next point objects to what he uses as a default reference frame that you disagree with. Lord forbid drew disagree about, I think priorities, and values?
> why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?"
It's the same question. I sympathize with both questions, I constant feel both frustrated, and broken with how few people care about quality, and participating fairly. I try very hard to find the positive aspects "everyone" claims llm codegen provides. I'm looking hard, and can't find them. It's painfully average, often worse so when it gets lost. It doesn't and can not help me, only get in the way, what am I doing wrong? Why is everyone missing something I see as obvious? But again, both could easily be true from both frames you suggest. "Why can't people identify this as trash" could very easily be followed by "what I'm I missing from the equation?" and be the same thought/idea.
> so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?
I mean, it's titled, A Eulogy for Vim. That seems to be what it says on the tin, no?
I've seen people celebrate horrors beyond my comprehension. Cheer the deaths of innocent people because it may inch some abstract national goal closer to a similarly abstract measurement. Insist that lives in one place are worth less than lives in another.
Should I ask "what am I missing"?
I don't think so, sometimes you draw a line on moral or ethical grounds. Some of those lines should never be given the ability to be fluid. It will always be wrong to bomb a school of children, just like (for Drew and I) it will be wrong to rip the livelyhood from under millions of people's feet for shareholder value. It will be wrong to ignore damaging consequences to the environment. It will be wrong to insist a low quality imitation should ever hold the same value as the original idea.
using gpt is like bombing schools?
I have never gotten this. How is livelihood being "ripped away"? There is enormous capability made available to anyone and everyone who wants to take hold of and do something with it. Just as it's on each individual to go through the process and pains of landing a job (or building a business, etc), it's also on each individual to keep up with changes that may affect their livelihood. If they want to keep it.
Who does it benefit to automate away well paid industries? For every well paid industry mostly automated away, you remove one more path for financial mobility.
One less path available means more people doomed to the service economy serfdom. You can be incredibly intelligent, creative, personable, and driven, but bad luck can still doom you to the role of a serf.
It's incredibly naive to assume the pattern of the short history of industrialization will continue. More jobs may have been created in the past, but where are those plans for the future? Why is it imperative we accept the plans of people making money hand over fist, while also forced to endure the hardships of adapting?
Jeff Bezos won't have difficulties adapting, but the average citizen will lose their healthcare and get beaten by a cop for protesting their own social murder.
Pure automation and efficiency can't be the one true path if we want to maintain our current economic system. Capitalism needs waste and inefficiency. It has little room for charity when the shareholders are the end beneficiary.
In the end eventually everyone will be at the same industry earning potential level (or whatever it's called), and then there will literally be no more "potential for earning" because there would be 0 economic value to human labor (but there will always be aesthetic value). And by then the greatest collective decision the majority of mankind will have to make in its existence would already have been made: do away with this highly flawed and unsustainable economic system, or be wholly at the mercy and whims of those unreasonably trying to keep it in place. It's up to us whether the inevitably fully automated future is a dystopia, or utopia. There is no viable middle ground.
Ironically, you are not considering that he is seeing something that you are not, but you are not asking "What am I missing?"
See, that sword cuts both ways.
That sentence jumped out at me.
note I used "rich" there, not "wealthy"
Not endorsing this world view, just noting that the wealthiest 1% of people in the world (encompasses most US citizens) have an enormously outsized impact on climate.
They certain consume far more than the poor, on account of having resources, but they also consume far less than the wealthiest 1%.
People forget this. Oil companies may have dug up the oil, but they did so because we paid them to, so we could use the energy for good and useful things.
Climate change isn't 'evil billionaire companies are ruining the world', it's 'these things we did to improve our lives turn out to have side effects'.
OTOH, I can already argue with numbers at hand that Bitcoin made the world poorer and worse off.
Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.
> The maturity of Vim9 script's modern constructs is now being leveraged by advanced AI development tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan recently demonstrated the efficacy of these new features through two projects generated using GitHub Copilot
https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20matur...
I am not sure I understand the author's concern, is he saying that VIM 9.2 is problematic because it enables AI integration due to the maturity of Vim9 script?
> sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software.
...where he links to a comment in a closed issue where someone accuses a contributor of using an LLM to generate patches: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...
The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.
I had revised the comment because I think I now understand Drew's chief complaint to be about the moral side of LLM usage, not the practical quality side of LLM usage.
He does use the word "slop" which implicates quality, but that's a single word in his essay, versus whole paragraphs about the moral questions of LLM usage and his stated reason that the fork was "to keep my conscience clear".
The next release will be the first where the majority of commits will be made by AI, and it has definitely not gone smoothly.
After a dozen or so bug reports, it's mostly in a working state, but I worry the output is no longer reliable in subtle ways.
I don't use ledger-cli myself but I do use the similar software hledger. I don't pay very close attention to hledger's development process, but I haven't noticed any bugs that affect me in years of using it.
A regression here and there would be normal before, major features breaking in this stable 25 year old software is simply unheard of.
This is not exciting cutting-edge software, it's a boring financial app. My instinct is people want stability and confidence that the output won't change and that their records will still parse.
That's pretty obvious to me. We're not in a court of law, the standard isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt".
This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one.
> It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands.
This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.
I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".
Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.
I'm not sure what you mean because that's literally what happened. The only remaining caveat is that it's not yet "everyone", but even that part is improving. If I was born in feudal Europe I would have spent my life planting, weeding, and de-pesting potatoes by hand instead of sitting at a computer in a climate-controlled office.
Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.
You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?
If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.
Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.
Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Mining practices can be bad even if the minerals are used for a purpose that we judge as good. Those can coexist (in tension, which is where we end up thinking about tradeoffs).
I will have to look into his fork because I too do not want to see any form of AI in vim.
I may also look to see what Elvis looks like these days. I really liked the GUI and colors Elvis defaulted to and I stuck with it for a while, but eventually I went to vim in the v5 days for reasons I forgot.
I don't think Vim is going away. Even with all the AI code written, engineers navigate through Claude Code / Codex using Vim (ex: Vim mode in Claude Code).
I really like Vim so much that I've built a gamified way to learn it at https://vimgolf.ai that I am working on completing.
In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation.
People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.
Whether you're a fanatical or not, of either side, LLM usage is driving energy and hardware prices to go up, it is an implicit driver of climate change, and it will replace jobs. I don't see what there's to argue.
Great article through and through.
Personally the leverage I have as a bit of a cranky graybeard myself is that I understand how software works and I can distinguish between good and bad uses of AI and think critically about how to influence things towards better software. Just declaring AI as unequivocally bad and evil will do nothing more than make me irrelevant. At some point being right is useless without some measure of also being effective.
I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I don't expect him to ever agree, but much respect nonetheless
The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.
It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse!
Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability).
Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)
Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.
It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.
I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.
Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.
However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.
I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me.
I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this.
Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be.
AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more.
I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there.
Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced.
It's awesome.
Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.
Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.
I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).
But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.
Personally I've always preferred a great book to blogs/tutorials/etc, and even still I'd reach for a book if I had the chance on a new programming language or anything. But not everyone learns well that way, and I accept that.
That is the sense which I think most important. There are millions upon millions of very bright people with lots of valuable domain experience in a massive variety of specialities other than computer programming, who will now be able to use their expertise to guide the creation of software which before would have taken them many years of study, or millions of dollars to hire programmers. Empowering people to create their own tools will be a massive boon to humanity.
This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The influx of people i have zero desire to interact with into my normal online spaces has been incredibly painful.
This was never the case.
To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.
Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that.
I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.
MIT scientist Richard Stallman resigns in the wake of his Jeffrey Epstein remarks https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex
He is assigning the blame to Epstein's victims.
The scenario being described was that Epstein was ordering some of his victims, who were ostensibly employed as masseuses at his resort, to go and offer sex to specific people who were at an event taking place there.
You don't keep a sex trafficking operation going as long as he did if you don't coerce victims in that situation to play along with the story that they are masseuses and that the offer of sex is coming from them.
if you dont understand what that is saying, i can't help you.
When third parties are discussing the crime, "the person who committed the crime may not have known they were committing a crime" is a valid, reasonable thing for a person to say as part of a discussion.
Doing so is not a defense of the person who trafficked the child to be raped.
"The trafficked person did not reveal they were being trafficked, because they were trapped on an island with their abuser and were afraid".
This is not blaming the victim, nor a defense of the abuser.
The statements that Stallman made about the nature of those crimes, were not what you claim they are.
From Minsky's point of view a girl who was old enough to legally consent to sex offered to have sex with him. According to witnesses at the event he turned down the offer.
You can't see the difference between "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" and "she was entirely willing"?
Stallman may be a dick, but at least he's precise with his speech - this means exactly what it says, and in no way means what you want it to mean.
What Stallman said is "the people who were trafficked, probably did not tell the people they were trafficked to, that they were being trafficked and were there unwillingly."
I don't see how saying that is a "defense of Jeffrey Epstein".
Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per1 psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let’s resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them “children”."
THESE ARE THE WORDS RICHARD STALLMAN POSTED ON HIS OWN WEBSITE WITHOUT BEING PROMPTED.
please defend this. i really really want to see you stoop this low.
EDIT: OKAY i'm being DOWNVOTED for bringing these words to light. officially y'all are now covering up for child sex criminals. Sickening.
It's just that you don't seem to realize that what you perennially appear to have understood, is not what anyone wrote.
Him posting that doesn't have anything to do with you telling lies about defending Epstein. Both are shitty.
Is it now appropriate for me to tell lies about you defending Epstein, because you did something shitty (falsely accusing others of defending Epstein)?
“We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman added. “Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.”
"Sex trafficker probably told the people he trafficked not to tell anyone that they were being trafficked. Trafficked people trapped on an island with their abuser may have done as they were told out of fear." Obviously.
I don't see how that statement is a defense of Epstein, or victim blaming.
But it didn't, so it isn't.
Emacs the tool and Stallman the person are not nearly as coupled as your comment implies. Stallman created Emacs, yes, but the Emacs community drove him out of the FSF in 2019, pushed back hard when he tried to return in 2021, and has been actively distancing itself from him for years. The community's resilience despite Stallman is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to say - it's not like Emacs users were defending him in solidarity.
Tools transcend their creators - it is actually an interesting point and worth making. You just didn't have to push Stallman shit here.
I'm literally describing the resilience of the emacs community exactly as you described.
And the emacs community deserves the right to call him out to distance ourselves from them.
I didn't ask for these weirdos to come demanding to litigate every detail of every sick quote he's ever given.
but i will not stand down to karma bullying to cover up sex crimes of a person just because i like his software.
> Stallman deserves to be criticized for his own positions.
I fully agree. I'm just asking to try to decouple that from Emacs.
> because i like his software
Can we agree that Emacs is no longer "his software" and it stopped being that long ago? Governance and ownership have separated from authorship, right? The point is - when the scandals got out, we didn't circle the wagons. If the tool and the person were tightly coupled, you'd expect the community to defend him. We didn't. The separation was/is real, not just rhetorical.
Sure, yes, GNU/Emacs is still officially an FSF project, and the FSF is still Stallman's institutional creation, even if he's been sidelined. His philosophical fingerprints - GPL, copyleft, free software ideology as distinct from open source - are baked into the project's DNA in ways that aren't cosmetic. So there's a version of "his software" that's genuinely hard to dislodge. I'm not trying to argue that or erase his authorship, no.
But can we still find a way to deal with it differently? Say:
- Wagner was viciously antisemitic; the music is still the music
- Caravaggio was violent, possibly a murderer, yet painted some of the most incredible art pieces
- Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer yet produced genuinely influential philosophy
People are complex creatures, sometimes we need to decouple the evaluation of the contribution from the evaluation of the person. I just want to avoid circles like: "using/praising Emacs is bad because Stallman is bad, therefore his creations are tainted".
I'm not defending Stallman or any of his behavior (good or bad), I'm defending something the community itself largely built, maintained, and steered. When people outside of the loop hear these things together, it hurts me personally - the conflation feels like a category error aimed at something I personally have a long relationship with.
The annoying thing about these whole thing is that you threw the Stallman material probably without even thinking about any of that. It's rhetorical ammunition, not a serious argument. You're not really engaging with what Emacs is to its users - just reaching for the most socially radioactive association available to win a point. And I'm now having to "defend" against an argument that was never made in good faith to begin with. Which is exhausting in a particular way - not because the argument is hard, but because you have to take it seriously even when it wasn't offered seriously.
a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender). b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.
I know that my point of view is considered .+(cist|phobic) (based on the post). I'm sorry for that.
That's great you can spend more time with your family, but the code you're writing this way is, by and large, probably crap.