jgb1984

LLM are a net negative on society on so many levels.

LLM anything makes me queasy. Why would any self respecting software developer use this tripe? Learn how to write good software. Become an expert in the trade. AI anything will only dig a hole for software to die in. Cheapens the product, butchers the process and absolutely decimates any hope for skill development for future junior developers.

I'll just keep chugging along, with debian, python and vim, as I always have. No LLM, no LSP, heck not even autocompletion. But damn proud of every hand crafted, easy to maintain and fully understood line of code I'll write.

Yeah, no thanks, I'll stick with Django (my bread and butter for over 15 years now!).

I'm tired of LLM, full stop.

As a long time (20+ years) vim user the passing of Bram came as a shock. But it has become clear to me that the project is in safe hands, and I've seen slow but steady progress, continuing the tradition of stability that Bram always safeguarded for 3 decades.

I do try out neovim from time to time, but I don't care for Lua (vimscript is easier to read and less verbose for .vimrc), I don't need an LSP and I found treesitter often buggy and slow.

So I'm sticking with vim, here's to another few decades more, thank you to all maintainers!

I tried chatgpt and claude, several times over the past year. To get it to say anything sensical is a laborious game of prompt trial and error, and even then in the end the code is of junior level at best, containing subtle bugs, inefficient instructions and needs a lot of refactoring. Not sure how emotions come into play, I tested a tool and found it useless to me. I'm much faster writing my own code, that I understand deeply, can reason about and learn from. I was never a fan of copy pasting big chunks of stack overflow that I didn't understand, which is exactly what LLM coding tools facilitate.

Been using Debian and vim for almost 25 years now. Tried many IDE's but they're distracting, bloated and slow.

My main language is python and for that I use jedi-vim (which allows me to jump to a definition), fzf with ripgrep to easily open files and search for specific things, and ALE that runs ruff formatting and linting. Tmux to keep my terminals organized and openbox to make it stylish and stay out of the way.

No LSP, no autocomplete, and sure as hell no AI nonsense.

Fake news. I've got my bare metal server deployed and installed with my ansible playbook even before you manage to log into the bazillion layers of abstraction that is AWS.

I've used postgresql in most of my previous jobs, but using mariadb in my current one, and I must say it's a joy to administer.

The replication and high availability that mariadb offers is rock solid, and much more advanced than what postgresql has to offer. It works out of the box, no plugins or third party shenanigans needed, and there is "one obvious way" to do it. Not a dozen options like in the postgresql ecosystem, each with it's own quirks and drawbacks.

Also, upgrades are a dream. I did 4 major long term stable release upgrades so far and everything was fully automatic and smooth sailing all around.

All of that with about 10 seconds downtime only for each upgrade, despite being a chunky 6TB database, thanks to the user friendly replication process.

I respect postgresql a lot, but mariadb allows me to sleep much better at night thanks to replication, smooth upgrades and no VACUUM to worry about.

I've been writing python for a living for almost 20 years. Big projects. Never felt the need for static typing. And I strongly dislike the verbosity and complexity it adds to the language. Python is beautiful because it's simple, easy to read, easy to understand. The typing tagged on to it looks like an ugly word salad to me.

I'll keep my dynamic typing, thanks!

As someone who is using python professionally for over 17 years I sincerely hope this PEP gets rejected.

Again, making the false argument that instead of learning a system engineer skillset you need to learn nothing at all. As if instead of spending time on systems, everything will be magically done for you and it costs zero FTE headcount.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You spend a similar amount of time, but on different knowledge and tasks. And I'm saying I find my skillset more enjoyable and more useful compared to the vendor lock-in and Tower of cloud services of Babylon that is AWS/Azure/Google.

If you think knowing apt / vim / postgresql / bash / linux intimately is a waste of time and just a pile of Unix trivia, then you and I are entirely different type of engineers / developers, I don't think we even speak the same language :) I'm actually grateful that your mindset is becoming more prevalent, as it only serves to increase the value of my own skillset.

Because setting up your server takes an infinite amount of time, while configuring things on AWS takes zero minutes, right?

It's weird how the same straw man argument comes back when this topic is discussed. As if the only two options in the world are cloud and on-premises bare metal. While the best solution is often to simply rent a bare metal server from any of the big hosting providers like Hetzner. They take care of cooling, physical security, hardware failures, network infrastructure etc. All you have to do is manage the server. Which isn't more or less work than managing the horror that is AWS (just 1000x more enjoyable in my opinion) while getting 10 times more bang for your buck.

It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.

The woke / sjw disease really ruins everything.

I have a visceral dislike, even hate, for what the LLM hype brought the world. The never ending slop it is spouting, filling up the entire internet. More and more I get confronted with images and media that turn out to be AI generated, when I find out I am disgusted and just close the tab.

Soulless drivel, endlessly streaming.

And I'm confident that the education system as we know it will be severely damaged because of it.

Even in our own field, I can guarantee you that software developers that "grew up" with these garbage AI assistants will be worse coders than the generation that came before. You will never develop the understanding, the insight, that's needed by chatgpt'ing your way through college and life.

Excellent news for my own market value of course, but I don't hesitate to say that I regret the LLM hype happened, the impact on the world is overwhelmingly negative (not even touching on the catastrophic environmental and financial cost to society).

Source? Unless you're locked into the Amazon flavor of cloud hell I'm pretty sure most people are using the "real" elasticsearch. I know I am.

This is a copy paste from the relevant part of my vimrc. Keep in mind I mainly develop in python.

Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag' Plug 'ap/vim-buftabline' Plug 'davidhalter/jedi-vim' Plug 'dense-analysis/ale' Plug 'dstein64/vim-startuptime' Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim' Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': { -> fzf#install() } } Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim' Plug 'junegunn/vim-peekaboo' Plug 'machakann/vim-swap' Plug 'markonm/traces.vim' Plug 'mhinz/vim-signify' Plug 'preservim/nerdtree' Plug 'preservim/tagbar' Plug 'romainl/vim-cool' Plug 'simnalamburt/vim-mundo' Plug 'tpope/vim-characterize' Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary' Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive' Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat' Plug 'tpope/vim-rhubarb' Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible' Plug 'tpope/vim-speeddating' Plug 'tpope/vim-surround' Plug 'vimwiki/vimwiki'

Most of the negatives mentioned (fragility, bugs, plugins breaking often) are specific to neovim. It's one of the reasons why I am and will always keep using vim instead of neovim. Vim is a much more mature ecosystem, less chasing the newest "plugin du jour", my vimrc is stable, based on a few dozen plugins which are feature complete and rock solid stable.

Your comment resonates with me! I'll stay on X with openbox for as long as I can, it works very well for me and I've collected a number of tools and scripts over the years which have no equivalent on Wayland. The most painful thing to miss would be openbox itself, that and fluxbox have been my window managers for more than 2 decades now...

AI generated ANYTHING is an instant turnoff for me.

That's incredibly funny, since I've been developing software for 20+ years using debian and vim (look mom, no IDE!) and I'm pretty sure that's what I'll be doing for the years to come. Imagine how valuable it will be when you're in the minority of humans who still understand how a linux system operates, and how to write and read your own code! Amazing! I absolutely welcome cloud and AI, happy to let it destroy any and all wisdom of future generations :)

ChatGPT, when I was forced to use it often got confused which is the bigger number, 2 or 3. I don't care how many lines of bottom of the barrel code it can throw up, I'm not using any of it. AI generated spaghetti debt.

LLM's will turn out to be nothing more than another glittering gadget. Except this one will obliterate any coding skills of future generations. Not to mention the gigatons of AI generated garbage text, images and music that it's filling the world with. What a waste.

Maybe it's time to move away from xz which has been criticized in the past as a not great format, has had maintainer issues for years, and now turns out to be infiltrated with security problems. Moving to zstd seems worthwhile.

I'll stay on Xorg, which has worked perfectly fine for me for decades, for as long as I can. I use openbox, and fluxbox before that. A bit of pekwm and bspwm in between. I love the diversity of Xorg window managers, and I prefer its architecture which allows one to write a new wm in a few hundred lines of code, instead of pushing all complexity away and creating massive fragmentation and (mediocre) reinvention of wheels.

Wayland tries to solve problems I don't have, while creating actual problems for many people like myself. It's a serious downgrade for me, so I'm staying with Xorg.

Same thing with neovim actually: a solution in search of a problem. I don't care for treesitter (it's slow, buggy and makes my code look like a Christmas tree on steroids), I don't like Lua and I have no use for an LSP. I'm staying with vim, on openbox, on Xorg, on Debian.

That's a lot of FUD. Look at the commit log of vim. As alive as ever. Capable hands took over when Bram passed away.

I'm sticking with vim, neovim doesn't offer anything of value to me since I don't want to use Lua, treesitter or lsp, and it takes away things I appreciate (gvim, stability).

You can pry xorg + openbox + tint2 + polybar from my cold, dead hands!

I would have written a similar comment, if I hadn't found yours first. I've been a vim user for 20+ years, combined with debian and bash. Those, together with python, have fused into my DNA by now I suspect.

I've tried out neovim on several occasions, but it didn't offer anything I needed (treesitter, lsp, lua: don't need or like either), plus it takes away something I love which is gvim. And worst of all, is what you describe: the neovim ecosystem is in permanent flux. Constantly deprecating, replacing and rewriting existing and new plugins. Re-implementing vimscript plugins in lua, just for the sake of it, but then often half-baked, with missing features and new bugs, only to be abandoned by a new shiny plugin 6 months later.

I much prefer my trusty old vim and vimrc, with stability and reliability. No need to chase the latest new bling, no need being scared that an update with vim-plug will break my things because the dozen plugins I use have been maturing over many years. Useful features, very few bugs, rock solid. Like vim itself, follow thoughtful development, slow and steady.

RIP Bram...