Hacker News Reader

Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

The author is the developer of the RSS reader Elfeed, which a lot of Emacs users use several times a day. Though the article talks about a vibe-coded wxWidgets-based GUI application called Elfeed2 that he wrote as a replacement, Emacs afficionados would be loath to leave their Emacs environment and switch to that. Hopefully Emacs elfeed finds a new maintainer.

View on HN

I tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs. Elfeed2 doesn't load content for most of my feeds, elfeed does. I also integrated elfeed-tube, which shows previews of videos and their transcripts, making it no-brainer to get a summary without watching the whole video.

> I tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs.

Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

My understanding of the context is the author is no longer using Emacs, and is very excited about the productivity from AI.

My experience with LLM technologies is it does make generating the code a really quick part. It may be reasonable to take much more time to specify things up front (rather than emergently as you would by hand). -- I mean, if you've got a well crafted description of what you want, you'll be able to get a working program MUCH quicker with an LLM, today, compared to writing it out by hand.

Would it really be surprising/shocking if an LLM was able to rewrite (most) features from an existing software, to a new software?

It seems like the reality today is, we've gone from a maintained software in a niche ecosystem with happy users, to a more fragmented one where everyone has an LLM write their own half-baked one.

On the other hand, given there is prior art in Elfeed, why wouldn't it rapidly converge on feature parity?

Probably because it's closer to a reimplementation than anything else, and in Emacs you can use libraries with much less friction than in self-contained languages.

I don't use elfeed, but installed elfeed-tube just for youtube-with-transcripts :)

Yeah, I'm not gonna use anything vibe-coded, all those apps are total trash.

Good. People here it's blind with the CADT model. They aren't even aware than with Elfeed for instance you can automatically set a hook on a feed that it calls lingva.el functions to translate, for instance, feeds written in Spanish or German to your native language in the spot.

Try doing that with Elfeed2.

Vi/Nvi2 users can almost do the same with Unix pipes and apertium/translate-shell/some lingva CLI translating tools for the whole document/regex selection/lines, a la Emacs. So can sfeed users, where depending on the feed they can pipe the plumbers' output (or just hack the scripts) to any other translating tool:

git://codemadness.org/sfeed

Heck, a few years ago I could reuse Telega.el's (Telegram client) translating functions for non-Telega buffers translating some text guide in the spot. So, did the blogger actually win something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com