7 ms·

A Eulogy for Vim

138 points by mtts 6mo ago

mikkupikku 6mo ago
I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I don't expect him to ever agree, but much respect nonetheless
- School-Cotton 6mo ago
  Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn. The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.
  - rkapsoro 6mo ago
    I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.
    - mikkupikku 6mo ago
      They absolutely were. The parallels are stark.
  - lxgr 6mo ago
    We've had this discussion back when high-level languages started becoming popular. Do the unwashed masses deserve to be programming a computer when they don't have a love and appreciation for assembly, or even the underlying ISA and its instruction encoding? And before that: How dare these whippersnappers just hand in their punched cards when they don't even know how to bit bang the boot sequence of the very computer executing them? It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse! Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability). Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)
  - djinnish 6mo ago
    You could use this exact same argument about any discipline and/or tool that has been made to support that discipline. A part of me loathes to make the comparison, but is an "audio engineer" any less of a musician than a traditional pianist? Maybe? It probably depends, but music has been made more accessible by the introduction of digital tools. Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.
  - rybosome 6mo ago
    I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups. It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too. I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy. Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true. However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.
- scrollaway 6mo ago
  > because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me. I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this. Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be. AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more. I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/ https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there. Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced. It's awesome.
  - endemic 6mo ago
    I'm debating using LLMs for my side projects. Does using one remove the "soul" of my project? On the other hand, a friend is actually making progress with his side app _because_ he's able to lean on the LLM after a full day's worth of working the day job. I might be able to actually do some of the things I've dreamed of and never had the capacity for. First world problems, I guess.
    - scrollaway 6mo ago
      I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for. Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how. Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code. I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...). But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.
- odst 6mo ago
  The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?
  - dinkleberg 6mo ago
    Obviously the knowledge gap required to go from zero to doing something useful has shrunk substantially. That is improved accessibility.
  - mikkupikku 6mo ago
    It takes most people years of burying their heads in a computer to become effective programmers of anything more than trivial software. This is rapidly changing.
    - ratrace 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - bigstrat2003 6mo ago
      That hasn't changed at all. You simply cannot be an effective programmer using AI. Heck, if you're having the thing write programs for you then you aren't a programmer at all at that point, because programming is the act of writing code. But you can't make good software if you just have the LLM bang it out for you, so nothing has changed.
- gundamdoubleO 6mo ago
  It does things for them and tells them what to do. Is that really making programming more accessible? I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. But accessible as in a path to actually start working on things yourself and developing an interest? For most people vibe coding 99% of their lines, I doubt it. And I don't really think that's a problem to be honest, but I don't really buy that it makes programming in and of itself more accessible, more just the result of that programming.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - freedomben 6mo ago
    It doesn't have to be used that way, though. I wouldn't disagree that it mostly is used that way, but it can just as easily be used to teach. My wife has proven that well. AI has been the best development ever for her because it can custom tailor the lesson/task to be hyper relevant to exactly what she is trying to do. Personally I've always preferred a great book to blogs/tutorials/etc, and even still I'd reach for a book if I had the chance on a new programming language or anything. But not everyone learns well that way, and I accept that.
  - mikkupikku 6mo ago
    > I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. That is the sense which I think most important. There are millions upon millions of very bright people with lots of valuable domain experience in a massive variety of specialities other than computer programming, who will now be able to use their expertise to guide the creation of software which before would have taken them many years of study, or millions of dollars to hire programmers. Empowering people to create their own tools will be a massive boon to humanity.
- acedTrex 6mo ago
  > because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The influx of people i have zero desire to interact with into my normal online spaces has been incredibly painful.
- canelonesdeverd 6mo ago
  I disagree, I think the over-reliance in these tools turns AI providers into the final gatekeepers of the profession. And with the raising prices of hardware, I'm afraid AI will make computing as a whole inaccessible to most people.
  - monkaiju 6mo ago
    The best counter to this is to just forego these tools and develop actual knowledge. Knowledge & skill is still power, no matter what the AI propagandists say
- gaws 6mo ago
  > an incredibly based individual This was never the case.
- balgg 6mo ago
  > because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.
AlexandrB 6mo ago
> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one. > It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself. I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".
- fhd2 6mo ago
  > I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation". Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.
  - AlexandrB 6mo ago
    > I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will. I'm not sure what you mean because that's literally what happened. The only remaining caveat is that it's not yet "everyone", but even that part is improving. If I was born in feudal Europe I would have spent my life planting, weeding, and de-pesting potatoes by hand instead of sitting at a computer in a climate-controlled office.
kgwxd 6mo ago
If you're not using any software that might include code that originally came from an LLM, might as well give up on everything now. I'll give up the base if I ever have to remove built-in AI tools, but I don't foresee Vim dev getting that dumb anytime soon.
jmclnx 6mo ago
Interesting he forked Vim 8.2.0148, but I am fine with that. I think I had to update ~/.vimrc to disable some a new default in v9 that annoyed me. I actually forgot what it was :) I will have to look into his fork because I too do not want to see any form of AI in vim. I may also look to see what Elvis looks like these days. I really liked the GUI and colors Elvis defaulted to and I stuck with it for a while, but eventually I went to vim in the v5 days for reasons I forgot.
skybrian 6mo ago
This doesn't seem like a good cost-benefit analysis for AI. Not sure what that would look like, but it seems like making some attempt to quantify the benefits would help.
- monkaiju 6mo ago
  There are hordes of AI-maximalists (many invested in AI being successful) to do that, far more than the critics
beastman82 6mo ago
Perhaps an argument against LLMs should acknowledge its awesome power could be harnessed for good, if only nominally
exitb 6mo ago
[dead]
roryrjb 6mo ago
I think I will use vim-classic and possibly contribute to it. Not because of AI, but because I actually want to use Vim over say something like Neovim* and I actually like vimscript, which imo didn't need the development of vim9script to improve it. Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.
sourcegrift 6mo ago
Drew is genius but a toxic genius, I've been using vim for 23 years and I'd rather not use vim than use his version of that's my only choice of vim
- e3bc54b2 6mo ago
  I've been reading and reading about DeVault for more than a decade now. If I can point to one person on the internet and definitively say that their today's version is better than a decade ago, it would be him. (Yes, I can say that he appears to have improved better in this time than I myself have, which can be interpreted in a more than one way). In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation. People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.
herodoturtle 6mo ago
> And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate the jobs of the poor and replace them with a robot that lies. That sentence jumped out at me.
- CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
  It's a little wrong. It's probably going to replace middle class jobs more than the jobs of the poor.
  - sam_lowry_ 6mo ago
    Poor tend to think of themselves as middle-class.
    - metalliqaz 6mo ago
      so do the rich note I used "rich" there, not "wealthy"
  - soperj 6mo ago
    The middle class is poor now.
    - nickvec 6mo ago
      Yep. The middle class is quickly disappearing.
  - linkregister 6mo ago
    For an environmentmaxxer, eliminating upper-middle class jobs is extremely effective, as this group consumes the lion's share of resources and bears the greatest impact on carbon emissions. Remember that the majority of industry is upstream of consumption. Not endorsing this world view, just noting that the wealthiest 1% of people in the world (encompasses most US citizens) have an enormously outsized impact on climate.
arjie 6mo ago
I love it. Some alternative pathways in code make finding good solutions more likely. I've always liked Neovim, so I'm going to stick with it. I use it in a pretty much vanilla mode. Just deoplete et al.
smitty1e 6mo ago
The user experience is alive and well: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
UweSchmidt 6mo ago
It doesn't look like they put AI into vim like Microsoft into Notepad. Someone used an outside AI to code something with vimscript, what do you expect? I'll be worried if they mess with even the smallest bit of established muscle memory of any vim user, but a separate language (probably a dead end) and apparently some new diff options don't seem too terrible.
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is Lord forbid if people disagree with you. I know Drew's vibe is always "I'm right because I'm the only one with the correct opinions", but it does get tiring after a while. Not to say AI isn't having huge drawbacks being introduced, and aren't exactly worry-free, but why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?" so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?
- sarchertech 6mo ago
  Well I think he’s taken a moral stance against AI, so it doesn’t matter to him if other people find it useful.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Right, a difference of opinion, which is fine, OK and even good. But why paint it as "Obviously the rest of you aren't smart enough to understand" instead of "Other's disagree", seems really strange (although in-character).
    - monkaiju 6mo ago
      He never said that, you're just strawmanning the piece
    - tovej 6mo ago
      Don't put thing in quotes if they're not actual quotes. Especially not if you mischaracterize the article.
- ChrisLTD 6mo ago
  Why should he should say something he doesn't believe? We don't have to agree with him.
  - 6mo ago
felixagentai 6mo ago
[flagged]
ectospheno 6mo ago
Plenty of people already submit AI code as their own change. I’d argue every open source program is already “tainted” in that way.
- ectospheno 6mo ago
  Didn’t think I’d have to clarify what quotes mean in this context but using an LLM to help with coding is fine and people should get over it as it’s already everywhere anyway.
elcapitan 6mo ago
One of the side effects of AI is definitely that a lot of people have way too much time at their hands which they can now invest in pointless community drama.
- monkaiju 6mo ago
  For a comment on a forum intended to foster a community of folks interested in software development, this is a remarkably anti community point.
omoikane 6mo ago
The linked reference said: > The maturity of Vim9 script's modern constructs is now being leveraged by advanced AI development tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan recently demonstrated the efficacy of these new features through two projects generated using GitHub Copilot https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20maturity,Copilot https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20matur... I am not sure I understand the author's concern, is he saying that VIM 9.2 is problematic because it enables AI integration due to the maturity of Vim9 script?
- cldellow 6mo ago
  Buried (IMO) in the post is: > sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software. ...where he links to a comment in a closed issue where someone accuses a contributor of using an LLM to generate patches: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099... The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.
  - tovej 6mo ago
    I think it's more fair to say that someone shows that a contributor has started to commit much more frequently and constantly breaking things, and that this corresponds to when they have started (self-reportedly) using LLM's for development.
    - cldellow 6mo ago
      Fair enough - my initial comment talked about quality, but I realized that was my own take on the situation. I had revised the comment because I think I now understand Drew's chief complaint to be about the moral side of LLM usage, not the practical quality side of LLM usage. He does use the word "slop" which implicates quality, but that's a single word in his essay, versus whole paragraphs about the moral questions of LLM usage and his stated reason that the fork was "to keep my conscience clear".
elif 6mo ago
If emacs can live through Stallman's descent into absurd un-asked-for pedophilliac defense positions, not limited to defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself, Vim can survive the simple passing of its creator.
- margalabargala 6mo ago
  > defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that. I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.
  - elif 6mo ago
    "argued in an email thread last week that Marvin Minskey, the late AI pioneer and longtime MIT professor, was unfairly accused of sexual assault and that one of the underage girls in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation likely presented herself as “entirely” willing to have sex" MIT scientist Richard Stallman resigns in the wake of his Jeffrey Epstein remarks https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex
    - elif 6mo ago
      I'll explain instead of just adding the easily discoverable quote. He is assigning the blame to Epstein's victims.
      - tzs 6mo ago
        How is that assigning the blame to Epstein's victims? The scenario being described was that Epstein was ordering some of his victims, who were ostensibly employed as masseuses at his resort, to go and offer sex to specific people who were at an event taking place there. You don't keep a sex trafficking operation going as long as he did if you don't coerce victims in that situation to play along with the story that they are masseuses and that the offer of sex is coming from them.
Kwpolska 6mo ago
A Vim contributor vibe-coded some toy plugins, and the reaction to that is forking Vim? Sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
- kyleee 6mo ago
  Very on brand for this gentleman
- tovej 6mo ago
  Not plugins: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...
  - Kwpolska 6mo ago
    Drew complains about plugins made by a #4 contributor who is also a member of the Vim organization on GitHub. This complaint is about someone who is currently #11 and is not in the GitHub org. If that contributor regularly makes low-quality contributions, it is worth investigating by the Vim team, but at first glance, those might just be teething problems that are unavoidable when adding a major feature to a widely used and highly configurable app.
  - soraminazuki 6mo ago
    That's an unfounded accusation being presented as proof.
    - tovej 6mo ago
      unfounded? They suddenly started using LLMs, their activity shot up, and the number of breaking changes did as well. That's pretty obvious to me. We're not in a court of law, the standard isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt".
aaroninsf 6mo ago
People sure hate change.
anthk 6mo ago
There's nvi2.
blastonico 6mo ago
I prefer VS Code with Claude Opus 4.6, it makes me more productive during my working hours so I can take more quality time with my family. I know that my point of view is considered .+(cist|phobic) (based on the post). I'm sorry for that.
- gaws 6mo ago
  > I prefer VS Code with Claude Opus 4.6, it makes me more productive during my working hours so I can take more quality time with my family. That's great you can spend more time with your family, but the code you're writing this way is, by and large, probably crap.
  - blastonico 6mo ago
    Garbage in, garbage out. Most of the code out there is already crap, I'm just embracing it.
nickandbro 6mo ago
Without getting into some of the other things mentioned in the article, I don't think Vim is going away. Even with all the AI code written, engineers navigate through Claude Code / Codex using Vim (ex: Vim mode in Claude Code). I really like Vim so much that I've built a gamified way to learn it at https://vimgolf.ai https://vimgolf.ai that I am working on completing.
taviso 6mo ago
I'm experiencing something similar with another piece of software. ledger-cli is a boring, dependable accounting application. The next release will be the first where the majority of commits will be made by AI, and it has definitely not gone smoothly. After a dozen or so bug reports, it's mostly in a working state, but I worry the output is no longer reliable in subtle ways.
- cdkmoose 6mo ago
  I think apps like this are the real risk. Who is going to get in trouble because vim* has a bug from AI generated code? Errors in your accounting software can get you into audit/compliance trouble.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  What specifically has gone poorly? Is a dozen bug reports high or low compared to previous versions of the software where humans are writing the code? I don't use ledger-cli myself but I do use the similar software hledger. I don't pay very close attention to hledger's development process, but I haven't noticed any bugs that affect me in years of using it.
  - taviso 6mo ago
    Major breaking bugs. A regression here and there would be normal before, major features breaking in this stable 25 year old software is simply unheard of. This is not exciting cutting-edge software, it's a boring financial app. My instinct is people want stability and confidence that the output won't change and that their records will still parse.
love2read 6mo ago
I really hate that the author tugged at the heart strings of someone who is not alive anymore to back their cause of hating AI.
my_throwaway23 6mo ago
I opened the comment section expecting to find a slew (a slop?) of LLM enthusiasts. I was not disappointed. Whether you're a fanatical or not, of either side, LLM usage is driving energy and hardware prices to go up, it is an implicit driver of climate change, and it will replace jobs. I don't see what there's to argue. Great article through and through.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.
  - monkaiju 6mo ago
    Removing AI quite clearly doesn't fit into that category. It doesnt reduce human suffering, hell the primary propagandists behind it are explicitly anti-humanists and want it to replace human creativity. Thankfully its awful at that
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dasil003 6mo ago
This is a weird hill to die on. As much as I resonate with many of the concerns, I don't see refusing to use AI as something that will actually help any of those things. Forking a stable version of vim is something I guess, but I don't really see the sky falling with mainline vim or neovim. Personally the leverage I have as a bit of a cranky graybeard myself is that I understand how software works and I can distinguish between good and bad uses of AI and think critically about how to influence things towards better software. Just declaring AI as unequivocally bad and evil will do nothing more than make me irrelevant. At some point being right is useless without some measure of also being effective.
anitil 6mo ago
I couldn't quite follow the logic in this article, though some comments on here have clarified what it seems Drew means here. To be honest, this spiralling logic reminds me of my thought processes when I was at my most depressed

138 points by mtts 6mo ago

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I don't expect him to ever agree, but much respect nonetheless

School-Cotton 6mo ago
Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn. The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.
- rkapsoro 6mo ago
  I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.
  - mikkupikku 6mo ago
    They absolutely were. The parallels are stark.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  We've had this discussion back when high-level languages started becoming popular. Do the unwashed masses deserve to be programming a computer when they don't have a love and appreciation for assembly, or even the underlying ISA and its instruction encoding? And before that: How dare these whippersnappers just hand in their punched cards when they don't even know how to bit bang the boot sequence of the very computer executing them? It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse! Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability). Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)
- djinnish 6mo ago
  You could use this exact same argument about any discipline and/or tool that has been made to support that discipline. A part of me loathes to make the comparison, but is an "audio engineer" any less of a musician than a traditional pianist? Maybe? It probably depends, but music has been made more accessible by the introduction of digital tools. Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.
- rybosome 6mo ago
  I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups. It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too. I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy. Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true. However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.
scrollaway 6mo ago
> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me. I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this. Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be. AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more. I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/ https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there. Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced. It's awesome.
- endemic 6mo ago
  I'm debating using LLMs for my side projects. Does using one remove the "soul" of my project? On the other hand, a friend is actually making progress with his side app _because_ he's able to lean on the LLM after a full day's worth of working the day job. I might be able to actually do some of the things I've dreamed of and never had the capacity for. First world problems, I guess.
  - scrollaway 6mo ago
    I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for. Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how. Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code. I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...). But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.
odst 6mo ago
The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?
- dinkleberg 6mo ago
  Obviously the knowledge gap required to go from zero to doing something useful has shrunk substantially. That is improved accessibility.
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
  It takes most people years of burying their heads in a computer to become effective programmers of anything more than trivial software. This is rapidly changing.
  - ratrace 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - bigstrat2003 6mo ago
    That hasn't changed at all. You simply cannot be an effective programmer using AI. Heck, if you're having the thing write programs for you then you aren't a programmer at all at that point, because programming is the act of writing code. But you can't make good software if you just have the LLM bang it out for you, so nothing has changed.
gundamdoubleO 6mo ago
It does things for them and tells them what to do. Is that really making programming more accessible? I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. But accessible as in a path to actually start working on things yourself and developing an interest? For most people vibe coding 99% of their lines, I doubt it. And I don't really think that's a problem to be honest, but I don't really buy that it makes programming in and of itself more accessible, more just the result of that programming.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- freedomben 6mo ago
  It doesn't have to be used that way, though. I wouldn't disagree that it mostly is used that way, but it can just as easily be used to teach. My wife has proven that well. AI has been the best development ever for her because it can custom tailor the lesson/task to be hyper relevant to exactly what she is trying to do. Personally I've always preferred a great book to blogs/tutorials/etc, and even still I'd reach for a book if I had the chance on a new programming language or anything. But not everyone learns well that way, and I accept that.
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
  > I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. That is the sense which I think most important. There are millions upon millions of very bright people with lots of valuable domain experience in a massive variety of specialities other than computer programming, who will now be able to use their expertise to guide the creation of software which before would have taken them many years of study, or millions of dollars to hire programmers. Empowering people to create their own tools will be a massive boon to humanity.
acedTrex 6mo ago
> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The influx of people i have zero desire to interact with into my normal online spaces has been incredibly painful.
canelonesdeverd 6mo ago
I disagree, I think the over-reliance in these tools turns AI providers into the final gatekeepers of the profession. And with the raising prices of hardware, I'm afraid AI will make computing as a whole inaccessible to most people.
- monkaiju 6mo ago
  The best counter to this is to just forego these tools and develop actual knowledge. Knowledge & skill is still power, no matter what the AI propagandists say
gaws 6mo ago
> an incredibly based individual This was never the case.
balgg 6mo ago
> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.

AlexandrB 6mo ago

> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one. > It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself. I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

fhd2 6mo ago
> I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation". Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.
- AlexandrB 6mo ago
  > I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will. I'm not sure what you mean because that's literally what happened. The only remaining caveat is that it's not yet "everyone", but even that part is improving. If I was born in feudal Europe I would have spent my life planting, weeding, and de-pesting potatoes by hand instead of sitting at a computer in a climate-controlled office.

kgwxd 6mo ago

If you're not using any software that might include code that originally came from an LLM, might as well give up on everything now. I'll give up the base if I ever have to remove built-in AI tools, but I don't foresee Vim dev getting that dumb anytime soon.

jmclnx 6mo ago

Interesting he forked Vim 8.2.0148, but I am fine with that. I think I had to update ~/.vimrc to disable some a new default in v9 that annoyed me. I actually forgot what it was :) I will have to look into his fork because I too do not want to see any form of AI in vim. I may also look to see what Elvis looks like these days. I really liked the GUI and colors Elvis defaulted to and I stuck with it for a while, but eventually I went to vim in the v5 days for reasons I forgot.

skybrian 6mo ago

This doesn't seem like a good cost-benefit analysis for AI. Not sure what that would look like, but it seems like making some attempt to quantify the benefits would help.

monkaiju 6mo ago
There are hordes of AI-maximalists (many invested in AI being successful) to do that, far more than the critics

beastman82 6mo ago

Perhaps an argument against LLMs should acknowledge its awesome power could be harnessed for good, if only nominally

exitb 6mo ago

[dead]

roryrjb 6mo ago

I think I will use vim-classic and possibly contribute to it. Not because of AI, but because I actually want to use Vim over say something like Neovim* and I actually like vimscript, which imo didn't need the development of vim9script to improve it. Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.

sourcegrift 6mo ago

Drew is genius but a toxic genius, I've been using vim for 23 years and I'd rather not use vim than use his version of that's my only choice of vim

e3bc54b2 6mo ago
I've been reading and reading about DeVault for more than a decade now. If I can point to one person on the internet and definitively say that their today's version is better than a decade ago, it would be him. (Yes, I can say that he appears to have improved better in this time than I myself have, which can be interpreted in a more than one way). In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation. People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.

herodoturtle 6mo ago

> And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate the jobs of the poor and replace them with a robot that lies. That sentence jumped out at me.

CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
It's a little wrong. It's probably going to replace middle class jobs more than the jobs of the poor.
- sam_lowry_ 6mo ago
  Poor tend to think of themselves as middle-class.
  - metalliqaz 6mo ago
    so do the rich note I used "rich" there, not "wealthy"
- soperj 6mo ago
  The middle class is poor now.
  - nickvec 6mo ago
    Yep. The middle class is quickly disappearing.
- linkregister 6mo ago
  For an environmentmaxxer, eliminating upper-middle class jobs is extremely effective, as this group consumes the lion's share of resources and bears the greatest impact on carbon emissions. Remember that the majority of industry is upstream of consumption. Not endorsing this world view, just noting that the wealthiest 1% of people in the world (encompasses most US citizens) have an enormously outsized impact on climate.

arjie 6mo ago

I love it. Some alternative pathways in code make finding good solutions more likely. I've always liked Neovim, so I'm going to stick with it. I use it in a pretty much vanilla mode. Just deoplete et al.

smitty1e 6mo ago

The user experience is alive and well: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/

UweSchmidt 6mo ago

It doesn't look like they put AI into vim like Microsoft into Notepad. Someone used an outside AI to code something with vimscript, what do you expect? I'll be worried if they mess with even the smallest bit of established muscle memory of any vim user, but a separate language (probably a dead end) and apparently some new diff options don't seem too terrible.

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is Lord forbid if people disagree with you. I know Drew's vibe is always "I'm right because I'm the only one with the correct opinions", but it does get tiring after a while. Not to say AI isn't having huge drawbacks being introduced, and aren't exactly worry-free, but why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?" so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?

sarchertech 6mo ago
Well I think he’s taken a moral stance against AI, so it doesn’t matter to him if other people find it useful.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Right, a difference of opinion, which is fine, OK and even good. But why paint it as "Obviously the rest of you aren't smart enough to understand" instead of "Other's disagree", seems really strange (although in-character).
  - monkaiju 6mo ago
    He never said that, you're just strawmanning the piece
  - tovej 6mo ago
    Don't put thing in quotes if they're not actual quotes. Especially not if you mischaracterize the article.
ChrisLTD 6mo ago
Why should he should say something he doesn't believe? We don't have to agree with him.
- 6mo ago

felixagentai 6mo ago

[flagged]

ectospheno 6mo ago

Plenty of people already submit AI code as their own change. I’d argue every open source program is already “tainted” in that way.

ectospheno 6mo ago
Didn’t think I’d have to clarify what quotes mean in this context but using an LLM to help with coding is fine and people should get over it as it’s already everywhere anyway.

elcapitan 6mo ago

One of the side effects of AI is definitely that a lot of people have way too much time at their hands which they can now invest in pointless community drama.

monkaiju 6mo ago
For a comment on a forum intended to foster a community of folks interested in software development, this is a remarkably anti community point.

omoikane 6mo ago

The linked reference said: > The maturity of Vim9 script's modern constructs is now being leveraged by advanced AI development tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan recently demonstrated the efficacy of these new features through two projects generated using GitHub Copilot https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20maturity,Copilot https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php#:~:text=The%20matur... I am not sure I understand the author's concern, is he saying that VIM 9.2 is problematic because it enables AI integration due to the maturity of Vim9 script?

cldellow 6mo ago
Buried (IMO) in the post is: > sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software. ...where he links to a comment in a closed issue where someone accuses a contributor of using an LLM to generate patches: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099... The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.
- tovej 6mo ago
  I think it's more fair to say that someone shows that a contributor has started to commit much more frequently and constantly breaking things, and that this corresponds to when they have started (self-reportedly) using LLM's for development.
  - cldellow 6mo ago
    Fair enough - my initial comment talked about quality, but I realized that was my own take on the situation. I had revised the comment because I think I now understand Drew's chief complaint to be about the moral side of LLM usage, not the practical quality side of LLM usage. He does use the word "slop" which implicates quality, but that's a single word in his essay, versus whole paragraphs about the moral questions of LLM usage and his stated reason that the fork was "to keep my conscience clear".

elif 6mo ago

If emacs can live through Stallman's descent into absurd un-asked-for pedophilliac defense positions, not limited to defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself, Vim can survive the simple passing of its creator.

margalabargala 6mo ago
> defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that. I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.
- elif 6mo ago
  "argued in an email thread last week that Marvin Minskey, the late AI pioneer and longtime MIT professor, was unfairly accused of sexual assault and that one of the underage girls in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation likely presented herself as “entirely” willing to have sex" MIT scientist Richard Stallman resigns in the wake of his Jeffrey Epstein remarks https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex
  - elif 6mo ago
    I'll explain instead of just adding the easily discoverable quote. He is assigning the blame to Epstein's victims.
    - tzs 6mo ago
      How is that assigning the blame to Epstein's victims? The scenario being described was that Epstein was ordering some of his victims, who were ostensibly employed as masseuses at his resort, to go and offer sex to specific people who were at an event taking place there. You don't keep a sex trafficking operation going as long as he did if you don't coerce victims in that situation to play along with the story that they are masseuses and that the offer of sex is coming from them.

Kwpolska 6mo ago

A Vim contributor vibe-coded some toy plugins, and the reaction to that is forking Vim? Sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

kyleee 6mo ago
Very on brand for this gentleman
tovej 6mo ago
Not plugins: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...
- Kwpolska 6mo ago
  Drew complains about plugins made by a #4 contributor who is also a member of the Vim organization on GitHub. This complaint is about someone who is currently #11 and is not in the GitHub org. If that contributor regularly makes low-quality contributions, it is worth investigating by the Vim team, but at first glance, those might just be teething problems that are unavoidable when adding a major feature to a widely used and highly configurable app.
- soraminazuki 6mo ago
  That's an unfounded accusation being presented as proof.
  - tovej 6mo ago
    unfounded? They suddenly started using LLMs, their activity shot up, and the number of breaking changes did as well. That's pretty obvious to me. We're not in a court of law, the standard isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt".

aaroninsf 6mo ago

People sure hate change.

anthk 6mo ago

There's nvi2.

blastonico 6mo ago

I prefer VS Code with Claude Opus 4.6, it makes me more productive during my working hours so I can take more quality time with my family. I know that my point of view is considered .+(cist|phobic) (based on the post). I'm sorry for that.

gaws 6mo ago
> I prefer VS Code with Claude Opus 4.6, it makes me more productive during my working hours so I can take more quality time with my family. That's great you can spend more time with your family, but the code you're writing this way is, by and large, probably crap.
- blastonico 6mo ago
  Garbage in, garbage out. Most of the code out there is already crap, I'm just embracing it.

nickandbro 6mo ago

Without getting into some of the other things mentioned in the article, I don't think Vim is going away. Even with all the AI code written, engineers navigate through Claude Code / Codex using Vim (ex: Vim mode in Claude Code). I really like Vim so much that I've built a gamified way to learn it at https://vimgolf.ai https://vimgolf.ai that I am working on completing.

taviso 6mo ago

I'm experiencing something similar with another piece of software. ledger-cli is a boring, dependable accounting application. The next release will be the first where the majority of commits will be made by AI, and it has definitely not gone smoothly. After a dozen or so bug reports, it's mostly in a working state, but I worry the output is no longer reliable in subtle ways.

cdkmoose 6mo ago
I think apps like this are the real risk. Who is going to get in trouble because vim* has a bug from AI generated code? Errors in your accounting software can get you into audit/compliance trouble.
JuniperMesos 6mo ago
What specifically has gone poorly? Is a dozen bug reports high or low compared to previous versions of the software where humans are writing the code? I don't use ledger-cli myself but I do use the similar software hledger. I don't pay very close attention to hledger's development process, but I haven't noticed any bugs that affect me in years of using it.
- taviso 6mo ago
  Major breaking bugs. A regression here and there would be normal before, major features breaking in this stable 25 year old software is simply unheard of. This is not exciting cutting-edge software, it's a boring financial app. My instinct is people want stability and confidence that the output won't change and that their records will still parse.

love2read 6mo ago

I really hate that the author tugged at the heart strings of someone who is not alive anymore to back their cause of hating AI.

my_throwaway23 6mo ago

I opened the comment section expecting to find a slew (a slop?) of LLM enthusiasts. I was not disappointed. Whether you're a fanatical or not, of either side, LLM usage is driving energy and hardware prices to go up, it is an implicit driver of climate change, and it will replace jobs. I don't see what there's to argue. Great article through and through.

JuniperMesos 6mo ago
Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.
- monkaiju 6mo ago
  Removing AI quite clearly doesn't fit into that category. It doesnt reduce human suffering, hell the primary propagandists behind it are explicitly anti-humanists and want it to replace human creativity. Thankfully its awful at that

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dasil003 6mo ago

This is a weird hill to die on. As much as I resonate with many of the concerns, I don't see refusing to use AI as something that will actually help any of those things. Forking a stable version of vim is something I guess, but I don't really see the sky falling with mainline vim or neovim. Personally the leverage I have as a bit of a cranky graybeard myself is that I understand how software works and I can distinguish between good and bad uses of AI and think critically about how to influence things towards better software. Just declaring AI as unequivocally bad and evil will do nothing more than make me irrelevant. At some point being right is useless without some measure of also being effective.

anitil 6mo ago

I couldn't quite follow the logic in this article, though some comments on here have clarified what it seems Drew means here. To be honest, this spiralling logic reminds me of my thought processes when I was at my most depressed