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".
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.
Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.
You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?
If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.
Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.
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.
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.
That sentence jumped out at me.
note I used "rich" there, not "wealthy"
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.
They certain consume far more than the poor, on account of having resources, but they also consume far less than the wealthiest 1%.
People forget this. Oil companies may have dug up the oil, but they did so because we paid them to, so we could use the energy for good and useful things.
Climate change isn't 'evil billionaire companies are ruining the world', it's 'these things we did to improve our lives turn out to have side effects'.
OTOH, I can already argue with numbers at hand that Bitcoin made the world poorer and worse off.
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?
Would be very different from say:
> I'd like to understand people who don't see it the same way as me, that it's mostly awful and not good.
Or similar, rather than "I'm right, everyone else don't understand it properly". Very HN-esque, but oh so tiring after 100s of articles in the exactly same vein from the same author.
It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious? Just fuels the whole "holier than thou" vibe Drew been trying to increase seemingly every day.
It's a disagreement of opinion, not some "I'm the only smart person who can realize this", which is why it kind of sours the entire piece.
I'll say this from the perspective of a person who publishes content online: because people's revealed preference is for content written this way. You can spend weeks polishing thoughtful, original content that will get few clicks, or you can crank out throwaway op-eds about AI and get thousands of likes and upvotes from people who just wanted to hear their own beliefs explained back to them.
My stuff appeared on HN a couple of times over the years and the less effort I put into it, the better it fared. The temptation to change your writing style and to offer increasingly more provocative and shallow opinions is difficult to resist.
My point is probably this: if you want to see better stuff, I think you gotta stop engaging with articles like this. Patrol /newest and upvote cool in-depth stuff.
This is too shallow of a take. Especially when your very next point objects to what he uses as a default reference frame that you disagree with. Lord forbid drew disagree about, I think priorities, and values?
> 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?"
It's the same question. I sympathize with both questions, I constant feel both frustrated, and broken with how few people care about quality, and participating fairly. I try very hard to find the positive aspects "everyone" claims llm codegen provides. I'm looking hard, and can't find them. It's painfully average, often worse so when it gets lost. It doesn't and can not help me, only get in the way, what am I doing wrong? Why is everyone missing something I see as obvious? But again, both could easily be true from both frames you suggest. "Why can't people identify this as trash" could very easily be followed by "what I'm I missing from the equation?" and be the same thought/idea.
> so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?
I mean, it's titled, A Eulogy for Vim. That seems to be what it says on the tin, no?
I've seen people celebrate horrors beyond my comprehension. Cheer the deaths of innocent people because it may inch some abstract national goal closer to a similarly abstract measurement. Insist that lives in one place are worth less than lives in another.
Should I ask "what am I missing"?
I don't think so, sometimes you draw a line on moral or ethical grounds. Some of those lines should never be given the ability to be fluid. It will always be wrong to bomb a school of children, just like (for Drew and I) it will be wrong to rip the livelyhood from under millions of people's feet for shareholder value. It will be wrong to ignore damaging consequences to the environment. It will be wrong to insist a low quality imitation should ever hold the same value as the original idea.
> 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?
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.
Emacs the tool and Stallman the person are not nearly as coupled as your comment implies. Stallman created Emacs, yes, but the Emacs community drove him out of the FSF in 2019, pushed back hard when he tried to return in 2021, and has been actively distancing itself from him for years. The community's resilience despite Stallman is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to say - it's not like Emacs users were defending him in solidarity.
Tools transcend their creators - it is actually an interesting point and worth making. You just didn't have to push Stallman shit here.
I know that my point of view is considered .+(cist|phobic) (based on the post). I'm sorry for that.
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.
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.
These two sentences do a great job of articulating a point I've tried (and failed) to make over the years re: the frustration (and sometimes visceral anger) I feel when arbitrary (or out-right unhelpful) changes are made to software I use-- particularly when that software is subject to forced updates.
In the past I've tried to use analogies about musicians and their instruments, or carpenters and their tools. I'll add this one to my list of analogies.
Silly quick example: There was no reason "Log off" needed to be changed to "Sign out" in the Windows Explorer close dialog post Windows 7. That change made the muscle memory gesture <CTRL>-<ESC> <ESC> <ALT>-<F4> <L> <ENTER> useless. Even more galling, though, you can't just substitute <S> for <L> in the gesture. The list box also contains "Switch User", "Sleep", and "Shutdown", too. To be sure you don't choose the wrong thing and, say, shut down a machine accidentally, you have to look at the screen. An appalling lack of attention to detail and disrespect for the users of the software to serve absolutely no functional purpose. (My BP is rising just typing about it...)
mikkupikku•1h ago
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
umanwizard•1h ago
The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.
rkapsoro•1h ago
lxgr•1h ago
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•57m ago
Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.
rybosome•24m ago
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•1h ago
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/) 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•1h ago
scrollaway•54m ago
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.
freedomben•50m ago
odst•1h ago
dinkleberg•1h ago
mikkupikku•25m ago
gundamdoubleO•1h ago
freedomben•55m ago
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•26m ago
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.