11 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] thread
I test if qwen3.5-35B-A3B can exit vim when running in a harness that allows it to read the raw terminal buffer and send raw key presses to the terminal. Enjoy!
what harness do you use ?
Obvious question demands an obvious answer. No. No-one can exit vim.

I started using it nearly 30 years ago now and there is still no end in sight. I’m pretty much convinced it’s just not possible at this point.

My favorite big-brained way of quitting is ZZ (save and quit) and ZQ (quit without saving). Learned these shortcuts from a video by the legendary Luke Smith [1].

1. https://lukesmith.xyz

Vimscript is extremely token efficient and very common in training data.

Dunno about constraining to a window, but vimscript itself could be a good way of sending editing commands.

The AI model is likely trained on Stack Overflow posts, or otherwise related content from wherever off the internet, so most likely it will have ripped off enough hand-written posts or articles on how to quit Vim. So of course it can regurgitate the required keystrokes on command.

And will the writers of those posts, who contributed their knowledge to help out their fellow humans, get a fraction of a penny for the hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars of profit the AI corps are making off the backs of their labour? I somehow doubt it.

Yeah, but it would still open three tabs, rewrite my config, and ask whether I meant :q or :qa!