There are several points of view here. Some people claim they will never need to "program" again because the LLM will do everything. That text editors are dead... and so is the career of programmer or software engineer. That nowadays, with Claude Code, you can reimplement anything (given a large enough context window, of course). That it is like being an expert in every programming language and system out there. That we should remove politicians and CEOs and put an AI in their place.
On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions. That it pulls in libraries and makes serious security mistakes. That it writes tests that are basically incomplete. That it is unable to synthesize and keep context. In short, it has the same flaws as humans.
I think these are binary points of view, and both are right. We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.
There has to be another way. Nobody questions the versatility LLMs provide, or the boldness they give you to take on new projects. But I am not convinced that programmers or software engineers are going to disappear. I am not convinced that a manager can ship a new feature in a couple of afternoons and then lay off, or skip hiring, a junior or senior developer. There is a line near the beginning of Dune that goes something like this: "there was a time when men handed their thinking over to machines in the hope of being freed, but that only allowed other men with machines to enslave them."
We need to find a new path between smartphone addiction and being dumbed down by LLMs.
> On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions.
I spent most of the early 2010s rewriting systems that had been outsourced to budget offshore coding shops in the 2000s. The software looked a lot like this: no code reuse, no system architecture, just copy pasta over and over.
The client didn't care about this of course, they weren't reading the code. What made them eventually fire the outsourcing shop and hire a guy like me was the bugs that wouldn't get fixed, and the request to fix a bug that caused three more bugs to get introduced.
I'd rewrite the software and it'd be functionally complete with 1/5th the code, and it'd be faster and have fewer bugs, as well as being maintainable.
I actually developed a sick enjoyment about reading through their code and understanding what they were doing. From what I can tell the guys were being put under pressure to produce code and close tickets. I would find big chunks of dead code that I think was to fool their SLOC counters.
Changing schema on one project required a change order and migrations submitted to DB folks so these guys discovered that mysql booleans were actually integers and they could stick whatever number they wanted in there, and ended up using existing boolean fields to store unrelated data! Of course this broke the original functionality in difficult to track down ways!
> We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.
Haha. I imagine Security and biology are the garlic and herbs that drive away the vampires and then the vampires sends their lesser minions to do their job.
> there was a time when men handed their thinking
Reminds me of the "knowing where to tap" story. Some already know where and how to tap and only delegate the tapping part. Some start from scratch and expect the machine to tell them where to tap.
The management, like the ship owner thinks that they don't need to call anyone. That's not the main risk though, it's the majority not caring enough to learn about the ship.
> [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.
> 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.
Yeah, I look for opportunities to replace personal vibe-coded utilities with public projects for this reason.
Software still feels like this grand exploration to me—what's the best way to use a computer? What's the best way to express a program?—and a hackable text editor epitomizes that ethos (though I'm partial to neovim myself). Every time I install a plugin, I feel like I'm participating in a clinical trial of UX design.
I think a lot of us feel this, and the community will have to solidify the ethos that trying out other peoples' software is noble and healthy, exposing you to their ideas, even if it's actually harder and worse in some ways than vibecoding.
(I also think, by extension, the OSS community will need a more developed ethics of project governance. This was a hot issue even before AI, e.g. the terraform license change. But when the default is a vibe-coded bubble, authors will need to communicate either
1. this is just code—use at your own risk, PR at your own risk, or
2. this is a community, here's what we want for/from users, here's what we want for/from contributors, here's how to get involved in maintainance/governance.
There's a principle I can't describe clearly. But one instance of it is the homogenization due to cheap(or free) instantaneous communications. Slow and limited created space and time to share, and incentives to do so because you needed to discuss with others to get or form new knowledge. Now everyone refers to the same source (see the evolution of design, choice of colors). Limits are protective in a way.
> 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.
Open source projects have always had forks, public and private. The ability to fork a project and use your own version of it privately, without needing permission or buy-in from others, has always been an explicitly valued aspect of open source software. If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?
I think the reason is an implicit assumption that the production of more unshared work means that less work will be shared. But I don't see why that would be true. We could just as easily, and more likely in my view, see more work shared with the world at the same time we see more work not shared with the world. The incentives for cooperation remain, even as it becomes easier to work alone.
Has anyone made a persuasive argument to the contrary, or provided evidence? It seems like the main problem AI has created for open source projects is an avalanche of bad PRs, not a drying up of good contributions.
> 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
1. There are a few, already. I haven't systematically surveyed the landscape, but here's one: https://neomacs.com/
2. AI coding is still far from mature -- with substantial improvements even in 2026. I expect the number of attempts will only burgeon as this capability matures. I can already see a proliferation of emacs packages written with AI.
3. I would expect hobbyist activity to be more correlated with the capabilities of open-weight & cheaper models, for a variety of reasons. Pure hobbyists (esp. outside Silicon Valley) don't often have the spare $$$ for a $200 subscription plan, and won't be as early to adopt AI coding as "professional" software engineers in Silicon Valley (or geographically / economically adjacent somehow).
“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.”
Nobody knows how Stallman, or anyone else, works either. But folks don’t need to understand how he works to understand, say, EMacs.
Folks can take EMacs as is and decipher it in isolation of Stallman, or any of the other authors.
But even then, how many people understand the internals of EMacs, or the interrelationships of the zillion lines of code in hundreds of files? Yet, millions of ignorant people leverage and apply EMacs to their daily tasks.
Look at what the REA impact is having on all sorts of code bases. The ONE THING that pushed Stallman over the edge and onto his path. The lack of source code to a print driver (or something along those lines).
Well, it’s all Open Source now.
Not only is the source “open”. It can be explained.
“Here is the source tree to EMacs. ELI5 the garbage collector.” “Working…”
It goes both ways. Now everyone has access to a savant to explain software, if that’s what they like.
You don't understand Stallman then. Now you are dependent on closed source from closed source AI vendors. True software freedom would then being able to dissassemble the bot writing your code.
"Being dependent on a small number of AI vendors, who also penetrate every aspect of your life to control, report, and spy upon you, forced to use AI at work or be laid off, or just be made redundant and let off anyway, while drowing in slop from every corner of social media, news, youtube, search results, and any other cultural production -- that's real freedom!"
I bet that person thinks driving a car is real freedom too.
(You need to pass a test, maintain a license from the government, in many places have proof of passing a maintenance test, pay an annual fee to the government, roads can be closed at will by the government. They can install tolls if they wish etc. In the UK, the police can stop you and search your vehicle without reason and I'm sure that's true in many other countries)
I'm also not sure how that ended up the definition of real freedom. Maybe some Spinoza is in order but genuine freedom is proper understanding of one's own, and others, nature and causes. That is to say one is free to the extent that one has adequate knowledge.
To live in ignorance, that is to be pushed, pulled or compelled by what you don't understand, for example because you've outsourced your life to the magical mystery programming box, is in his terminology bondage.
Which also explains why all these AI psychosis people sound like crack addicts. Stallman is still completely correct about what software freedom is
Other ones being to keep paying the AI bros in perpetuity, and having all your prompts, data, and IP getting stolen by the same people with the goal of eventually undermining your own ability to think. We will all be as free as the people living in Pods in Matrix.
Fun fact: The README of excali-mode has 25 matches of pattern `, not `. I know, looking for these patterns isn't useful at all these days in any sense... but it's just too tempting.
It all comes down to the attitude towards hacking, or any other profession / hobby for that matter, whether one (at a specific mood) enjoys the process or the results. The latter group has something to show off in the end, the former usually doesn't. But they know what they earned.
> The irony is rich that 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 irony is that Stallman promoted free software and allot of code got published online for free, and now LLMs have trained on this code. Without Stallman there will be no vibe coding.
I don’t find that ironic. As the post says, AI gives people the ultimate freedom to materialize Stallmans world where everyone can modify the software they use any way they want. The fact that his movement helped that become a reality seems the opposite of irony.
> RMS appeared in a recent video recounting his CSAIL work on a circuit analyzer in which he, and I'm paraphrasing, "didn't model the circuit as a system of equations to be solved, but rather approached it much as a human would" by applying a series of diagnostics.
Sadly I moved away from Emacs as my daily driver and I just orchestrate agents in tools I build. Emacs will have a lasting impact on me and I will probably be back somehow.
Yeah, I really need to let AI write more useful elisp bits for daily life. Like a magit commit message writer, esp. the GNU Changelogs. And much more such thinks.
> But there's one glaring headscratcher, and that's its full-blown,
self-contained implementation of a terminal emulator, in Rust no less. In the before times, a developer would undoubtedly seek such a heavy
lift from off-the-shelf kit, but the holmes replicated over a
coffee break what a billionaire with infinite resources had been
toiling over the last five years.
Is this really true, though? Did model improvement since Ghostty began simply eclipse Ghostty and anything achievable with that now "legacy" code base? Would that project be better off abandoned or started over from scratch with Opus 5.5? Or is there something more there?
There is, in terminal usage and programming lingo, "raw terminal mode" and "cooked mode" ; not seeing the original discussion linked, I do wonder if "cooked" was used in both meanings of the word and not just 1.
It's clearly in that sense that it's called "cooked". Which other meaning do you think applies?
The README of the project itself explains; "cooked" allocates the pty and interprets dynamically whether the other side is a command-line reader or full-screen program. See: https://github.com/vodik/cooked
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight, but now everyone's just sending a drone." Perfectly said. For those of us concerned about editor efficiency, it's hard to know where to go from here. For years I'd been working on a design tool that was inspired by Vim - entirely keyboard driven using mnemonic keychords. But LLMs really took the wind out of my sails, because eh, why bother now? Somewhere deep down I feel that it's still viable, because I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important. I just don't know if it will be considered important by everyone else.
> "I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important."
Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.
It is almost hypocritical for AI enthusiasts to say we don't need to look at code anymore, while everything they do is build on piles and piles of infrastructure and tools that are carefully hard-coded, deterministic building blocks. The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.
I am just constantly baffled by people thinking that because we can make (crappy) end-user apps and one-off tools, no one needs to code anymore. Does anyone build solid tools and libraries? Does anyone still get pleasure from building a rock solid, snappy app?
I can feel all the AI coded apps and website turning to ever buggier sludge under my fingertips, and people are rejoicing that this is the way of the future.
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.)
I was saying almost this same thing to a coworker. I'm building something that's like Emacs, but for agents, and it's mostly a Markdown-forward tool for managing all the agents and agent coding harnesses, and it's a vendor-agnostic things....If anything it's like a newer, faster, fancier org-mode, but knows how to inject all the right context into all the agentic projects.
This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
Emacs is not an advanced text editor, it's more like an OS. I run Claude Code inside emacs (with the claude-code-ide package). I seriously think LLMs will usher in a new golden era for emacs because you can now reap all the benefits without having to learn elisp.
> sealed up transistors can reproduce the same outputs given the same inputs
with unerring precision. The power to unambiguously differentiate an
on- versus an off-signal -- the binary "digital" -- might seem
trivial, but is 100% the reason why we're so comfortable handing over
the reins to computers.
Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who see this comment a lot, and hates it. Computers are only "deterministic" because they have about 47 layers of error correction between you and reality.
I spend a lot of time thinking about AI’s effect on me, as a person. TLDR: it’s a mixed bag: for non-coding things, AI has helped me learn and understand the world better. For coding, using AI coding harnesses and agents feels like an addiction.
I will say that I have used AI coding tools to make my Emacs setup the best it has ever been in 40+ years using Emacs.
It is weird to be using tools that sometimes make me think more about myself and their effect on me than the actual technical work I am doing.
> Whither now, we ask -- now that we have, even to my
jaded eye, a god machine that makes short work of all the stuff we
emacsers believed we were faster at than people using lesser tools.
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.
Is that a common thought? I learned vim, then emacs, and various other tooling not because I wanted to increase my speed competitively, but just to reduce my frustration with the gap between thinking and doing. Using something like VSCode to code is like playing on a laggy piano (if that exists). You think about I need to quickly update the signature of this function and it turns into a mouse/keyboard chaotic dance with your eyes focusing all over the place. It's like doing a three legged race.
With emacs and vim, I think about the code, notice that I want to change to change something, and can do the necessary actions (almost) subconsciously. Which means, I never stop thinking about the code. It may be longer or faster than someone using another software, but the advantage for me is to rely mostly on muscle memory while I'm thinking deeply about some problems.
Another thing is multiple buffer/views at once. This is why I don't like editors that have vim mode, because it's a pain to browse code with them, especially when you want a global view of something. With both emacs and vim, I can have multiple related files/sections of files/output of commands visible at once. Like how you would want physical papers and lay them on a desk.
Yeah, I think framing in terms of 'effort' or 'flow' might make more sense than 'speed' here.
If you expect that you can complete some task just from the keyboard, then the idea of having to use the mouse interrupts what you're doing.
The original post gives "stage and commit in git" as an example. Magit is much nicer than CLI, since you can quickly invoke the actions you want; it's less effort than typing out the full command on the CLI. -- With LLM coding agents, getting an LLM agent to make a commit is slower than doing it yourself in magit (if all you're going to do is stage and commit), but it's much less effort.
>ut at the time, rules-based
programming was still novel enough to be considered a viable approach
to AI.
Pick MLite from https://t3x.org and you'll get it pretty fast. Or with invariants under Lisp. Or its weird cousing, CLIPS, born from Common Lisp clauses.
On code quality, Neomacs (an Emacs clone in Rust, it has Elisp support) crashes a lot. And by a lot, I mean once you hit the menu with the mouse, it segfaults.
>he only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.
Is not about the rules, but the relations. It's a network of clauses, and not something akin to if-then-else with flow controlling. There's no actual "flow".
It's a highly experimental thing someone decided to mess around with, without any prior design discussion with any Emacs core devs. It's like a forty-minute-old baby and you're asking it to parallel park without crashing. What's your point here, I don't get it?
GNU/Emacs is incredibly stable. It's one of the most reliable pieces I've ever had; I sometimes run it for months without ever restarting. Which I can't say about pretty much any app on my system. Including the system itself.
I didn't got a crash on Linux/Wayland. And I didn't tested on MacOS or Windows.
What's your device envionment?
Could you please submit a GitHub issue to neomacs? (better with a minimal reproducible script and log `RUST_LOG=INFO ./neomacs` can output the debug log)
> The irony is rich that 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.
Why are people so sure this will keep scaling? We're still so far away from me being able to get anything even remotely close to what I can imagine using a free model running on hardware I own.
Then you need to remember there are a lot of very powerful people currently invested in not letting us have any of this, so I really don't think it's time to call free software irrelevant yet.
Oh they __WANT__ you to have it... but you gotta $$$ for it... every month. Anything your imagination can think up... just put your card # in... that's American freedom!
I use it mostly as a personal StackOverflow. I describe my issue as best as I can and get answers/suggestions, sometimes a code snippet that I check and paste over, but often still writing my own code or rewriting the snippet so much that it's as if I wrote it in the first place.
The friction makes it much slower than agentic coding but it helps me stay in control and it's still faster than before.
Here's a fun question - if AI is trained on OSS, particularly with licenses that are copy left... wouldn't that make all the code it generates copy left? wouldn't that mean the weights themselves should all be open sourced.
It's a txt file. If you don't know what that is, it's bit like a markdown file, but without the emojis and bullet points. If you can't consume a txt file, that's a failing on your part.
Like demanding commented machine code between 1985 and 2025.
Sure you can get it, but that's not where the software lives even if it's how the software runs.
Reverse engineering closed source software is the simplest thing in the world now. The only reason why more of it isn't done is because it's so boring even minding the AI isn't worth most people's time.
Fable 5.2 is designing entire devices now, from PCB layout to case assembly.
If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude. Get into business. The only way you're going to make it is to join the ownership class. Or pick up a torch or pitchfork and join the revolution.
This is such a wrong way of looking at it. The fact that AI is getting better and giving us better toolings is more of a reason to go and get an education.
There are several points of view here. Some people claim they will never need to "program" again because the LLM will do everything. That text editors are dead... and so is the career of programmer or software engineer. That nowadays, with Claude Code, you can reimplement anything (given a large enough context window, of course). That it is like being an expert in every programming language and system out there. That we should remove politicians and CEOs and put an AI in their place.
On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions. That it pulls in libraries and makes serious security mistakes. That it writes tests that are basically incomplete. That it is unable to synthesize and keep context. In short, it has the same flaws as humans.
I think these are binary points of view, and both are right. We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.
There has to be another way. Nobody questions the versatility LLMs provide, or the boldness they give you to take on new projects. But I am not convinced that programmers or software engineers are going to disappear. I am not convinced that a manager can ship a new feature in a couple of afternoons and then lay off, or skip hiring, a junior or senior developer. There is a line near the beginning of Dune that goes something like this: "there was a time when men handed their thinking over to machines in the hope of being freed, but that only allowed other men with machines to enslave them."
We need to find a new path between smartphone addiction and being dumbed down by LLMs.
> On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions.
I spent most of the early 2010s rewriting systems that had been outsourced to budget offshore coding shops in the 2000s. The software looked a lot like this: no code reuse, no system architecture, just copy pasta over and over.
The client didn't care about this of course, they weren't reading the code. What made them eventually fire the outsourcing shop and hire a guy like me was the bugs that wouldn't get fixed, and the request to fix a bug that caused three more bugs to get introduced.
I'd rewrite the software and it'd be functionally complete with 1/5th the code, and it'd be faster and have fewer bugs, as well as being maintainable.
I actually developed a sick enjoyment about reading through their code and understanding what they were doing. From what I can tell the guys were being put under pressure to produce code and close tickets. I would find big chunks of dead code that I think was to fool their SLOC counters.
Changing schema on one project required a change order and migrations submitted to DB folks so these guys discovered that mysql booleans were actually integers and they could stick whatever number they wanted in there, and ended up using existing boolean fields to store unrelated data! Of course this broke the original functionality in difficult to track down ways!
It's like a tractor or a chainsaw. There is still just as much need for good engineering, if not more, than before.
> We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.
Haha. I imagine Security and biology are the garlic and herbs that drive away the vampires and then the vampires sends their lesser minions to do their job.
> there was a time when men handed their thinking
Reminds me of the "knowing where to tap" story. Some already know where and how to tap and only delegate the tapping part. Some start from scratch and expect the machine to tell them where to tap.
The management, like the ship owner thinks that they don't need to call anyone. That's not the main risk though, it's the majority not caring enough to learn about the ship.
> In short, it has the same flaws as humans.
only the clueless, stupid ones
I'm wondering- did you read the article? Because you seem to be answering conclusions that it didn't reach.
Software engineers know that AI code is kind of bad and leads to issues down the road.
Shills and luddites say AI is capable of replacing SWE
> [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.
https://human-emacs.org/
good to see treesitter is now vibecoded too...
Gonna get its milkshake drunk if GNU decides to allow AI.
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.
Yeah, I look for opportunities to replace personal vibe-coded utilities with public projects for this reason.
Software still feels like this grand exploration to me—what's the best way to use a computer? What's the best way to express a program?—and a hackable text editor epitomizes that ethos (though I'm partial to neovim myself). Every time I install a plugin, I feel like I'm participating in a clinical trial of UX design.
I think a lot of us feel this, and the community will have to solidify the ethos that trying out other peoples' software is noble and healthy, exposing you to their ideas, even if it's actually harder and worse in some ways than vibecoding.
(I also think, by extension, the OSS community will need a more developed ethics of project governance. This was a hot issue even before AI, e.g. the terraform license change. But when the default is a vibe-coded bubble, authors will need to communicate either
1. this is just code—use at your own risk, PR at your own risk, or
2. this is a community, here's what we want for/from users, here's what we want for/from contributors, here's how to get involved in maintainance/governance.
You can be either but you have to say which.)
There's a principle I can't describe clearly. But one instance of it is the homogenization due to cheap(or free) instantaneous communications. Slow and limited created space and time to share, and incentives to do so because you needed to discuss with others to get or form new knowledge. Now everyone refers to the same source (see the evolution of design, choice of colors). Limits are protective in a way.
> 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.
Open source projects have always had forks, public and private. The ability to fork a project and use your own version of it privately, without needing permission or buy-in from others, has always been an explicitly valued aspect of open source software. If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?
I think the reason is an implicit assumption that the production of more unshared work means that less work will be shared. But I don't see why that would be true. We could just as easily, and more likely in my view, see more work shared with the world at the same time we see more work not shared with the world. The incentives for cooperation remain, even as it becomes easier to work alone.
Has anyone made a persuasive argument to the contrary, or provided evidence? It seems like the main problem AI has created for open source projects is an avalanche of bad PRs, not a drying up of good contributions.
> 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
1. There are a few, already. I haven't systematically surveyed the landscape, but here's one: https://neomacs.com/
2. AI coding is still far from mature -- with substantial improvements even in 2026. I expect the number of attempts will only burgeon as this capability matures. I can already see a proliferation of emacs packages written with AI.
3. I would expect hobbyist activity to be more correlated with the capabilities of open-weight & cheaper models, for a variety of reasons. Pure hobbyists (esp. outside Silicon Valley) don't often have the spare $$$ for a $200 subscription plan, and won't be as early to adopt AI coding as "professional" software engineers in Silicon Valley (or geographically / economically adjacent somehow).
“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.”
Nobody knows how Stallman, or anyone else, works either. But folks don’t need to understand how he works to understand, say, EMacs.
Folks can take EMacs as is and decipher it in isolation of Stallman, or any of the other authors.
But even then, how many people understand the internals of EMacs, or the interrelationships of the zillion lines of code in hundreds of files? Yet, millions of ignorant people leverage and apply EMacs to their daily tasks.
Look at what the REA impact is having on all sorts of code bases. The ONE THING that pushed Stallman over the edge and onto his path. The lack of source code to a print driver (or something along those lines).
Well, it’s all Open Source now.
Not only is the source “open”. It can be explained.
“Here is the source tree to EMacs. ELI5 the garbage collector.” “Working…”
It goes both ways. Now everyone has access to a savant to explain software, if that’s what they like.
You don't understand Stallman then. Now you are dependent on closed source from closed source AI vendors. True software freedom would then being able to dissassemble the bot writing your code.
"Being dependent on a small number of AI vendors, who also penetrate every aspect of your life to control, report, and spy upon you, forced to use AI at work or be laid off, or just be made redundant and let off anyway, while drowing in slop from every corner of social media, news, youtube, search results, and any other cultural production -- that's real freedom!"
A freedom that only works as long there is an AI model one is able to reach for, with stolen data from the whole known universe.
I bet that person thinks driving a car is real freedom too.
(You need to pass a test, maintain a license from the government, in many places have proof of passing a maintenance test, pay an annual fee to the government, roads can be closed at will by the government. They can install tolls if they wish etc. In the UK, the police can stop you and search your vehicle without reason and I'm sure that's true in many other countries)
I'm also not sure how that ended up the definition of real freedom. Maybe some Spinoza is in order but genuine freedom is proper understanding of one's own, and others, nature and causes. That is to say one is free to the extent that one has adequate knowledge.
To live in ignorance, that is to be pushed, pulled or compelled by what you don't understand, for example because you've outsourced your life to the magical mystery programming box, is in his terminology bondage.
Which also explains why all these AI psychosis people sound like crack addicts. Stallman is still completely correct about what software freedom is
Other ones being to keep paying the AI bros in perpetuity, and having all your prompts, data, and IP getting stolen by the same people with the goal of eventually undermining your own ability to think. We will all be as free as the people living in Pods in Matrix.
Fun fact: The README of excali-mode has 25 matches of pattern `, not `. I know, looking for these patterns isn't useful at all these days in any sense... but it's just too tempting.
It all comes down to the attitude towards hacking, or any other profession / hobby for that matter, whether one (at a specific mood) enjoys the process or the results. The latter group has something to show off in the end, the former usually doesn't. But they know what they earned.
> The irony is rich that 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 irony is that Stallman promoted free software and allot of code got published online for free, and now LLMs have trained on this code. Without Stallman there will be no vibe coding.
I don’t find that ironic. As the post says, AI gives people the ultimate freedom to materialize Stallmans world where everyone can modify the software they use any way they want. The fact that his movement helped that become a reality seems the opposite of irony.
> Without Stallman there will be no vibe coding.
Without FSF, there would have been probably somewhat less open-source data, but certainly not dramatically less.
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.
Strong isolation where it matters, completely free otherwise.
Isn't that just... software engineering?
> RMS appeared in a recent video recounting his CSAIL work on a circuit analyzer in which he, and I'm paraphrasing, "didn't model the circuit as a system of equations to be solved, but rather approached it much as a human would" by applying a series of diagnostics.
bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI
Sadly I moved away from Emacs as my daily driver and I just orchestrate agents in tools I build. Emacs will have a lasting impact on me and I will probably be back somehow.
I even re-designed my book review site to Emacs style: dersavage.github.io/fiction
Yeah, I really need to let AI write more useful elisp bits for daily life. Like a magit commit message writer, esp. the GNU Changelogs. And much more such thinks.
Loved it.
> But there's one glaring headscratcher, and that's its full-blown, self-contained implementation of a terminal emulator, in Rust no less. In the before times, a developer would undoubtedly seek such a heavy lift from off-the-shelf kit, but the holmes replicated over a coffee break what a billionaire with infinite resources had been toiling over the last five years.
Is this really true, though? Did model improvement since Ghostty began simply eclipse Ghostty and anything achievable with that now "legacy" code base? Would that project be better off abandoned or started over from scratch with Opus 5.5? Or is there something more there?
These are honest questions.
There is, in terminal usage and programming lingo, "raw terminal mode" and "cooked mode" ; not seeing the original discussion linked, I do wonder if "cooked" was used in both meanings of the word and not just 1.
It's clearly in that sense that it's called "cooked". Which other meaning do you think applies?
The README of the project itself explains; "cooked" allocates the pty and interprets dynamically whether the other side is a command-line reader or full-screen program. See: https://github.com/vodik/cooked
Given that we're talking about terminal emulation, I'd be more surprised if "cooked" wasn't a reference to cooked mode
The cooked package probably arose from this comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1w2ibbx/what_kind_of...
More discussion on it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1xren7e/emacs_in_the...
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight, but now everyone's just sending a drone." Perfectly said. For those of us concerned about editor efficiency, it's hard to know where to go from here. For years I'd been working on a design tool that was inspired by Vim - entirely keyboard driven using mnemonic keychords. But LLMs really took the wind out of my sails, because eh, why bother now? Somewhere deep down I feel that it's still viable, because I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important. I just don't know if it will be considered important by everyone else.
> "I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important."
Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.
It is almost hypocritical for AI enthusiasts to say we don't need to look at code anymore, while everything they do is build on piles and piles of infrastructure and tools that are carefully hard-coded, deterministic building blocks. The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.
I am just constantly baffled by people thinking that because we can make (crappy) end-user apps and one-off tools, no one needs to code anymore. Does anyone build solid tools and libraries? Does anyone still get pleasure from building a rock solid, snappy app?
I can feel all the AI coded apps and website turning to ever buggier sludge under my fingertips, and people are rejoicing that this is the way of the future.
I refuse. I will not touch Claude.
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.)
I was saying almost this same thing to a coworker. I'm building something that's like Emacs, but for agents, and it's mostly a Markdown-forward tool for managing all the agents and agent coding harnesses, and it's a vendor-agnostic things....If anything it's like a newer, faster, fancier org-mode, but knows how to inject all the right context into all the agentic projects.
This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
Emacs is not an advanced text editor, it's more like an OS. I run Claude Code inside emacs (with the claude-code-ide package). I seriously think LLMs will usher in a new golden era for emacs because you can now reap all the benefits without having to learn elisp.
I mostly use Emacs not to write code, though. In fact, getting Claude to do explorations for me and output its findings as org docs is fantastic.
> sealed up transistors can reproduce the same outputs given the same inputs with unerring precision. The power to unambiguously differentiate an on- versus an off-signal -- the binary "digital" -- might seem trivial, but is 100% the reason why we're so comfortable handing over the reins to computers.
Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who see this comment a lot, and hates it. Computers are only "deterministic" because they have about 47 layers of error correction between you and reality.
Great read, thanks.
I spend a lot of time thinking about AI’s effect on me, as a person. TLDR: it’s a mixed bag: for non-coding things, AI has helped me learn and understand the world better. For coding, using AI coding harnesses and agents feels like an addiction.
I will say that I have used AI coding tools to make my Emacs setup the best it has ever been in 40+ years using Emacs.
It is weird to be using tools that sometimes make me think more about myself and their effect on me than the actual technical work I am doing.
Navel gazing.
> Whither now, we ask -- now that we have, even to my jaded eye, a god machine that makes short work of all the stuff we emacsers believed we were faster at than people using lesser tools. 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.
Is that a common thought? I learned vim, then emacs, and various other tooling not because I wanted to increase my speed competitively, but just to reduce my frustration with the gap between thinking and doing. Using something like VSCode to code is like playing on a laggy piano (if that exists). You think about I need to quickly update the signature of this function and it turns into a mouse/keyboard chaotic dance with your eyes focusing all over the place. It's like doing a three legged race.
With emacs and vim, I think about the code, notice that I want to change to change something, and can do the necessary actions (almost) subconsciously. Which means, I never stop thinking about the code. It may be longer or faster than someone using another software, but the advantage for me is to rely mostly on muscle memory while I'm thinking deeply about some problems.
Another thing is multiple buffer/views at once. This is why I don't like editors that have vim mode, because it's a pain to browse code with them, especially when you want a global view of something. With both emacs and vim, I can have multiple related files/sections of files/output of commands visible at once. Like how you would want physical papers and lay them on a desk.
Yeah, I think framing in terms of 'effort' or 'flow' might make more sense than 'speed' here.
If you expect that you can complete some task just from the keyboard, then the idea of having to use the mouse interrupts what you're doing.
The original post gives "stage and commit in git" as an example. Magit is much nicer than CLI, since you can quickly invoke the actions you want; it's less effort than typing out the full command on the CLI. -- With LLM coding agents, getting an LLM agent to make a commit is slower than doing it yourself in magit (if all you're going to do is stage and commit), but it's much less effort.
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight,
but now everyone's just sending a drone."
>ut at the time, rules-based programming was still novel enough to be considered a viable approach to AI.
Pick MLite from https://t3x.org and you'll get it pretty fast. Or with invariants under Lisp. Or its weird cousing, CLIPS, born from Common Lisp clauses.
On code quality, Neomacs (an Emacs clone in Rust, it has Elisp support) crashes a lot. And by a lot, I mean once you hit the menu with the mouse, it segfaults.
>he only catch is you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.
Is not about the rules, but the relations. It's a network of clauses, and not something akin to if-then-else with flow controlling. There's no actual "flow".
> Neomacs crashes a lot
It's a highly experimental thing someone decided to mess around with, without any prior design discussion with any Emacs core devs. It's like a forty-minute-old baby and you're asking it to parallel park without crashing. What's your point here, I don't get it?
GNU/Emacs is incredibly stable. It's one of the most reliable pieces I've ever had; I sometimes run it for months without ever restarting. Which I can't say about pretty much any app on my system. Including the system itself.
> hit menu with the mouse
I didn't got a crash on Linux/Wayland. And I didn't tested on MacOS or Windows.
What's your device envionment?
Could you please submit a GitHub issue to neomacs? (better with a minimal reproducible script and log `RUST_LOG=INFO ./neomacs` can output the debug log)
> The irony is rich that 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.
Why are people so sure this will keep scaling? We're still so far away from me being able to get anything even remotely close to what I can imagine using a free model running on hardware I own.
Then you need to remember there are a lot of very powerful people currently invested in not letting us have any of this, so I really don't think it's time to call free software irrelevant yet.
Oh they __WANT__ you to have it... but you gotta $$$ for it... every month. Anything your imagination can think up... just put your card # in... that's American freedom!
This reads like someone getting AI psychosis from building one-shot prototypes. Many such cases.
I'm still not using AI to do more than get me in the door with finding new features, like: "tell me how to get my matplotlib output into tiff".
The AI tooling seems too unstable still.
I use it mostly as a personal StackOverflow. I describe my issue as best as I can and get answers/suggestions, sometimes a code snippet that I check and paste over, but often still writing my own code or rewriting the snippet so much that it's as if I wrote it in the first place.
The friction makes it much slower than agentic coding but it helps me stay in control and it's still faster than before.
Here's a fun question - if AI is trained on OSS, particularly with licenses that are copy left... wouldn't that make all the code it generates copy left? wouldn't that mean the weights themselves should all be open sourced.
Only if the lawmakers and courts side with the way less powerful FOSS side in interpreting the impact of those licenses on the derivative LLM code.
So, no.
Is it too much to ask to format your text in the middle aligned?
Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.
HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.
Read the article in emacs. Looks great as it’s plain text.
It's a txt file. If you don't know what that is, it's bit like a markdown file, but without the emojis and bullet points. If you can't consume a txt file, that's a failing on your part.
Well browsers can't format plaintext. Better question why is he serving plaintext documents on the web in the 21st century?
So text files are considered avant-garde now?
The whole idea of free software seems quaint.
Like demanding commented machine code between 1985 and 2025.
Sure you can get it, but that's not where the software lives even if it's how the software runs.
Reverse engineering closed source software is the simplest thing in the world now. The only reason why more of it isn't done is because it's so boring even minding the AI isn't worth most people's time.
Fable 5.2 is designing entire devices now, from PCB layout to case assembly.
If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude. Get into business. The only way you're going to make it is to join the ownership class. Or pick up a torch or pitchfork and join the revolution.
> join the ownership class
...which is rapidly running away from you. Ignore this nonsense and do useful work. It will be okay.
This is such a wrong way of looking at it. The fact that AI is getting better and giving us better toolings is more of a reason to go and get an education.
> If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude
I hope you are not advising any young people out there.