It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses.
I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.