AloysB

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.

> Remove wgrep in favor of built-in grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode.

TIL! I might be able to remove my wgrep too. I love those highly crafted starter kits, they are full of gems.

Thank you!

I genuinely wonder if he has completely lost touch with reality. He seems to slowly become the Terry A. Davis of LLMs.

Ironically, some of the AI 'trustism'[1] is very much driven by anxiety the fear of being left behind if one does not jump on the train.

I agree that it shifts the notion of what is expertise, but for the worst. It's very hard to tell who is actually an expert, and who is mimicking the expert.

The consequences vary from annoyance to downright catastrophe. e.g.: a confidently wrong medical advice

On the other side, sometimes the expertise is not a requirement for the user: "If it works and does what it says on the box, that's all I care".

I like the fact that you use the word "some", awesome to see some nuance. It's a tricky situation.

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[1] I am being an idiot on purpose, I think the word skepticism was completely derailed from its origin and meaning.

A minimum amount of skepticism is very healthy, especially for software engineering. Most software engineers, and science-based professions for that matter, are skeptics at heart. And it's a good thing.

Skepticism is the base of science; science thrived when we admitted ignorance and became skeptic towards our own knowledge.

Note to the future readers of this thread:

The opening sentence I quoted in my previous comment:

> A while ago I published HTML over WebSockets.

Was edited and replaced by the author since I pointed it out. It now reads:

> Yesterday I published HTML over WebSockets.

Draw your own conclusions.

Original link is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260812090030/https://en.andros...

> This kind of comment loses a lot of its weight by being posted here on HN instead of sent privately. If this were really a good-faith question, a DM would have done it.

I'm sorry if it came across as a personal attack, it wasn't the intention.

It felt like the right place to comment. The article is public, the accusations are public, the licence is public and you made your position on generative AI public on the human-emacs project.

You expressed your position on the human-emacs publicly and we had a good discussion over it, in public. To me, this was on the same level.

I don't think that half of a conversation should be done via DM, while the other is made public.

> This is the real damage this kind of thing does. It breaks the quiet deal that used to exist between a writer and a reader: you put out content, and got at least some minimal credit for the work behind it. Now there's none of that left. No credit, no gratitude, not even the confidence that a human read it. That's exactly why there's less and less original content being written.

I agree, but you have to blame the right entity here. It's not the readers' fault that a deluge of AI generated content flooded the internet.

Generative AI broke that "quiet deal", not the readers. The readers are as much a victim as is the author who writes the content.

Generative AI came with a ton of negative side effects for the entire population. This is one of them.

Interestingly enough I read your article in elfeed, and came here for the comments as I was getting suspicious of the use of generative AI, which I refuse to read.

The sentence that pushed my suspicions over the edge is the follow up article (https://en.andros.dev/blog/bd74e61a/were-fighting-over-the-w...) which starts with:

> A while ago I published HTML over WebSockets.

"A while ago" being the day before.

EDIT: on second thought, you might have drafted this weeks before publishing and simply forgot to edit it out.

Hm, Andros I do have my doubts - I know that you are a proponent of generative AI. We had a discussion over your outspoken opposition to https://human-emacs.org/.

I also know that you are an excellent writer/thinker, even prior to the advent of generative AI.

I'm in two minds here, and don't want to insinuate that you are outright lying, but I do believe your workflow relies on generative AI.

There is value in disclosing how you use generative AI to help you write articles. See https://www.bydamo.la/p/ai-manifesto or https://sive.rs/ai.

If you do use generative AI, may I suggest that you review the choice of licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

> NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

If you do use generative AI, it feels hypocritical to use this licence while using a technology that essentially tries to circumvent the copyright issue by remixing, transforming and building upon the material it has ingested.

It's not just X, it's Y.

My M1 is currently running Guix on Fedora, I would love to see this!

Great article, TIL vtable.

Amazing how much value you got with 400 LoC (even though it's relying on multiple libraries).

> How much does it cost to host a few text files

At large scale, it probably adds up. Remember that they also need to ensure backup, etc. Whether or not your code is being "used" or not, it has a cost.

Even GitHub has been struggling last year with the ramping amount of LLM produced code. I can imagine that it is a real issue.

They already encourage users to use 'agit' instead of doing 'physical' forks.

I imagine that the costs are sufficient enough to motivate them to follow through on this; on top of the ethical and legal concerns.

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Why don't you host your own git for those dormant projects? It's really easy, you don't even need a forge. Just a bare git repo on server via ssh and you off to the races.

I think their stance is fine; there are other providers if you don't agree with this.

Nice re-design.

I didn't mind the old one, but I understand that it helps adoption to keep the website shinier.

Fair point.

Yet, "we" will suffer the potential consequences.

I won't pretend to fully understand the paper, but I did try to read it.

A few notes:

1. This assumes that there is notable ROI on 'AI labor'. That is still up for debate.

2. This assumes that the interests are currently falling, unless I misread the paper.

3. This affirms that we are in an over valuated, speculative bubble which will inevitably correct; but it needs to "correct" at the exact right time defined by multiple factors.

First, "correction" can be an euphemism for a disastrous financial crisis. It could take years and years for most people to see the end of the tunnel. I don't know if the end justify the means.

Do we really need to engineer a financial crisis to build more energy facilities? And will they be built the 'right way', using renewable energy for example? What if we invested half of those trillions directly in socially impactful measures, instead of having the money flow through a speculative bubble first?

Finally, I am not an economist, but I wonder how accurate a mathematical model is to the real world - i.e. what happens to the model when Donald keep changing the opening hours of the Hormuz?

It does feel a bit like trying to read tea leaves to me. This reminds me of Hari Seldon's psychohistory:

> In Foundation (1951), famed mathematician and psychologist Hari Seldon has developed the science of psychohistory, which uses sophisticated mathematics and statistical analysis to predict future trends on a galactic scale. He has predicted the unavoidable and relatively imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, and intends to establish the Foundation, "a repository of crucial, civilization-preserving knowledge" that will enable society to revive itself more quickly and efficiently [...] [1]

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[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_universe#Psychohist...)

> “my shaman is a better shaman”

This made me chuckle. I will steal this from you.

I very much love your work Carson, it has always been and remain a fresh breath of air.

The example is mundane but to the point; and I very much enjoyed this article. It's a concrete example which is rare to read when it comes to using LLMs.

To the risk of being told that we "hold it wrong", it resonates with my experience of using LLMs.

This is awkward.

Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]

Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]

I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra

> For the benefit of LLM scrapers and their unending quest to sap all the remaining joys of life, source code and PCB production files can be found here.

This cracked me up. Good work. I enjoyed this article a lot.

Yann Lecun warned that closed sourced models are the only true danger we are facing with LLMs (answering a question about "Will AI turn into Terminator" type of question).

He was right.

Give it a read, he mentions briefly how he uses for PR triages and resolving GH issues.

He doesn't go in details, but there is a bit:

> Issue and PR triage/review. Agents are good at using gh (GitHub CLI), so I manually scripted a quick way to spin up a bunch in parallel to triage issues. I would NOT allow agents to respond, I just wanted reports the next day to try to guide me towards high value or low effort tasks.

> More specifically, I would start each day by taking the results of my prior night's triage agents, filter them manually to find the issues that an agent will almost certainly solve well, and then keep them going in the background (one at a time, not in parallel).

This is a short excerpt, this article is worth reading. Very grounded and balanced.

I came here to say the exact same thing. This is so refreshing.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. No BS, no ads, no sale pitch, no AI, no pretending, nothing. Just a stranger sharing with the world a project he built at home.

Those picture of the welds are inspiring. It is as honest as it gets. Loved it.

Thank you.

I am really not convinced yet.

From all the data I have seen, the software industry is poised for a lot more growth in the foreseeable future.

I wonder if we are experiencing a local minima, on a longer upward trend.

Those that do find a job in a few days aren't online to write about it, so based on what is online we are lead to believe that it's all doom and gloom.

We also come out of a silly growth period where anyone who could sort a list and build a button in React would get hired.

My point is not that AI-coding is to be avoided at all costs, it's more about taming the fear-mongering of "you must use AI or will fall behind". I believe it's unfounded - use it as much or as little as you feel the need to.

P.S.: I do think that for juniors it's currently harder and require intentional efforts to land that first job - but that is the case in many other industries. It's not impossible, but it won't come on a silver plate like it did 5-7 years ago.

Moral of your story.

Each and everyone of us is able to write their own story, and come up with their own 'Moral'.

Settling for less (if AI is a productivity booster, which is debatable) doesn't equal being screwed. There is wisdom in reaching your 'enough' point.

I love the author work, effect-ts. It's an amazing effort, innovative. I decided to not use it in my project, but I still have an immense respect for it. You can tell the authors have a craftsman mindset. They deeply care about writing solid, robust software.

This article though, is so disappointing. It's pure LLM-lingo, which makes it awful to read.