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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Millions?

There are maybe 30-60 million software developers and software developer adjacent people on this planet. Out of those probably 30% are late AI adopters, laggards, that haven't even used a terminal client and some don't even use AI.

Also a lot of people - developers included, just don't like command line tools.

Then pi is a secondary harness after Claude, Codex, OpenCode. I imagine the likelihood of pi having more than a few hundreds of thousands of users is remote. It's basically the Emacs or Vim of harnesses.

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It's a dependency of OpenClaw. Everything else aside, that's ~390k likely users minimum due to the auto-starring.

Though, I realize now the "hundreds of thousands" claim I was responding to is per week, while my guess is all time.

> It's a dependency of OpenClaw.

True, but I think even OpenClaw usage has falled off a cliff, plus that makes it implicit usage, most OpenClaw users probably don't care either way, it was chosen for them and they probably don't think much about it.

We package Pi w/ Qwen3.6 35B-A3B configures with our software, we're ramping up close to 500 clients, so there is our contribution.

Awesome, just 999 500 more for the first million!

What kind of software?

You don't think that millions of people use vim and emacs? Out of 30-60 million software people?

No, I definitely do not think millions of people use Emacs or Vim regularly. Vim is used more as it's available for quick config file editing on Linux.

I've been working for 20 years and I've met exactly 1 person daily driving Emacs (at least for a while), probably 10 people daily driving Vim and maybe low hundreds side arming Vim (maybe 5 for Emacs). And I've met or worked with low thousands of people at this point.

If I had to guess, probably 100 000 Vim daily drivers and maybe 20 000 Emacs daily drivers, both for extended periods of time. Dabblers probably 2-3x that at any time.

It can really vary from one industry to another.

You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.

As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.

I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.

But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim. Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.

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