A Eulogy for Vim

mikkupikku

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

AlexandrB

> 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".

kgwxd

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

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

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.

beastman82

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

roryrjb

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

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

herodoturtle

> 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.

arjie

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

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

UweSchmidt

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

> 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?

ectospheno

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

elcapitan

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.

omoikane

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%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?

elif

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.

Kwpolska

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.

aaroninsf

People sure hate change.

anthk

There's nvi2.