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Comment by orng | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of the points on the article although it doesn't really have much to do with vim (which the author acknowledges).

I too have often compared AI usage to vim in the past months: AI enthusiasts seem to spend most of their time tweaking their setup; creating custom agents, skills, mcp servers, writing custom tools for their agent to use, customizing their harnesses, loops and whatnot. Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config. It makes you feel productive while you really aren't and while in the end it might help you better stay within the flow the author talks about it the article the gains are typically very minimal if one is honest with oneself.

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Man I just stick with the defaults on vim. I want to be able to install vim on any server I'm SSH'd into and have it all work the same way.

I do use Neovim as an IDE but thats a bit different, as lazynvim does 90% of what I need and the rest is just tiny changes that improves the experience for me. I also use AI to change my lua files simply because its faster and I'd rather focus on programming.

I've been fighting the urge to keep tweaking the setup, and with local models, the desire is even more involved. I'm pretty close now to the following:

1. llamacpp with custom reasoning budget and reasoning message tailored to a specific agent.

2. opencode with tailored agent that has access to dynamic context pruning and a graph of the code base.

3. Because local models love to reason instead of working, the llamacpp budget stops the reason with a message that reminds them to use subagents and to prune the context

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This is successful enough that I can make and expand greenfield projects into full blown tools. I've just built this morning a open document templating system that lets me build reports into reports and make them look nice with templates. What would have bloated up to ~1M context stays within the dynamic context prune's limits set 50k-85k; some of the limits are because of the 128GB GPU, but mostly because processing times go down the larger the context.

So yeah, it's pretty easy to want to keep tweaking this stuff. I'm happy though, I don't have to ever contemplate some cloud service changing my work flow because they need to squeeze $$$ out of my job.

Another anecdote: I am a big nvim user and set everything up three years ago and basically haven't touched it since. At this point I'm a bit afraid I won't be able to fix it if something breaks lol.

I do think the culture of tweaking constantly without ever doing real work exists, but it's far less common than it seems online. People who make posts about their neovim configs all the time are certainly more likely to be in this camp than people not posting at all.

I was super into vim in college (20 years ago now, jeez). I started off like that but then transitioned to basically using “default vim” (plus support for a few external tools like ctags or cscope). For basically this reason!

> Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config.

What (or why) are those frequent config changes?

I use neovim and I can say I've migrated[1] to vim packages (from Pathogen) years ago, and I also git-clone a repo once every few years if I want LSP support for a language I haven't used before.

But I wouldn't call this "keep updating/rewriting".

[1]: By removing a line from my config, and then running `mv` once.

It really seemed more in vogue in 2011ish, Command-T and nerdtree era

vim tweakers are a small minority of users surely. I might fiddle with my config once per year.

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