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vhantz • yesterday at 10:59 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

  > 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.


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msteffen • today at 1:39 AM

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.)

jnpnj • yesterday at 11:32 PM

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.

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