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jrm4yesterday at 5:52 PM4 repliesview on HN

This feels like the "wrong" direction today with the advent of AI? Just seems like in the realm of "bending yourself to the tool vs bending the tool to yourself," it's the LATTER that's about to get a whole lot easier, if it isn't already.

So, sure, there are probably things you can learn, but e.g. I'm much more about "I think it should be THIS way so how do I make it do that."


Replies

massysettyesterday at 6:29 PM

The problem is both (1) knowing what you want, and (2) specifying what you want.

(1) is hard enough and a necessary prerequisite to (2) which, even so, is even harder than (1).

Good, documented software is the accumulated knowledge of people who (1) knew what they wanted, (2) implemented it, and (3) communicated how it works. AI can ease the building of such software but does not make the process trivial.

uselesswordsyesterday at 6:45 PM

You are getting downvoted quite heavily but I do wonder what percentage of people are growing more and more accustomed to the latter.

I say this someone who was dedicated to (neo)vim for a decade. With AI I spend a lot less time writing/editing pure code these days, and all the VSCode based IDEs have become so essential to my workflow/productivity that using vim only would be masochistic. I still enable the vim binds in my editor and while they’re never a perfect 100% replacement I get so much value out of other tools I can’t see myself going back.

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AlexandrByesterday at 6:37 PM

Learning Vim has been one of the highest-longevity skill I picked up in University. With every new technology - autocomplete, IDEs, various GUI design interfaces - there's always a chorus of folks who say: "Well now you don't need to Vim, this new tool makes that obsolete." And every time I end up having to manipulate a mountain of text regardless - whether that's in logs, source code, configuration, or documentation. With the amount of text that AI outputs I don't see the need to manipulate text going away and Vim is one of the fastest and most flexible ways to do that.

shmerlyesterday at 7:22 PM

neovim is pretty flexible and extensible if you don't want to follow default behavior.