AI has quietly killed every reason to use Emacs
Emacs in the Age of Magic
A longtime Emacs user argues that Claude Code and its successors have erased the editor's core advantages: editing speed, customization, and LISP expressiveness all evaporate once you stop typing and start describing what you want. Two case studies show the new normal — a high schooler reimplementing Excalidraw's entire stack in Elisp and a Rust terminal emulator built over a coffee break — proof that quixotic builds now cost nothing but tokens.
Editing speed, customization, the expressiveness of LISP: every advantage we claimed vanished the moment we stopped typing and started telling the AI what we wanted. We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight, but now everyone's just sending a drone.
- jefurii
> [W]e are here to declare our intent to use and develop a version of Emacs that is free from LLM-generated contributions regardless of whatever policy GNU decides upon. We invite them to weigh the costs and do the right thing, in which case we will continue to support them. But if they are not willing to do so, we will continue to use and develop an LLM-free version of Emacs anyway, even if it is not GNU Emacs.
- vhantz
> I believe a sufficiently interested emacs developer with a
$100 plan and a long weekend could hammer out a pretty good first cut.
That no one's yet done it is clear evidence that no one really wanted
these things so much as they wanted to talk about it.
The disappearance of bikeshedding doesn't look like an obvious one but it's a huge loss. Imagine if every scientist resolved to refer to already written books and carry on their research in closed labs with no discussion with the rest of their field.
- russfink
“AI has turned Stallman's goal of software
freedom on its head. Having your computer do whatever your
imagination can think up -- that's real freedom. The only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.”
- spapas82
I more or less agree with the article but we can move it one step further. Nowadays we don't even need text editors no matter how advanced they are. I am a VS Code user and I have not opened VS Code in more than 3 months because I don't need it anymore. Opening a text editor and editing code by hand seems like so ... yesterday.
This definitely is a new era and, personally, I love it! (Also I have broken my right arm so I can't write code even if I wanted to. I'm dictating this text.)
- Animats
It's a whole new world.
We need to be thinking about modularity with well-defined APIs now,
to isolate the chunks created by AI coding. Maintainabilty requires firewalls.