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
> 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.
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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
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?
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.
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.
It's amusing seeing this brought up in the thread when:
a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender).
b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.
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.
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 that I am working on completing.
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] threadI 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
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.
This was never the case.
To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.
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".
Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
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.
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.
That sentence jumped out at me.
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?
Ironically, you are not considering that he is seeing something that you are not, but you are not asking "What am I missing?"
See, that sword cuts both ways.
> 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%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?
> 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-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.
a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender). b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.
I know that my point of view is considered .+(cist|phobic) (based on the post). I'm sorry for that.
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.
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 that I am working on completing.
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.
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.