I have officially retired from Emacs

You're right Spacemacs is essentially a batteries-included version of Emacs.

[1] https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/04/01/

Hence my question, what Wellons (who's a seasoned veteran of Emacs) could ever say anything about Spacemacs (or Doom - which in this context makes no difference)? What kind of views one would be interested to hear? Using the Space key as the "Lead key", or something about local-leader key; or vim-navigation/Evil in general; or modules/layers architecture of Emacs config? He said in that post you shared that he believed he'd eventually end up using Evil - he doesn't need to use Spacemacs for that.

Spacemacs is great for beginners, for people who don't want to deal with learning Emacs native bindings - they are legit confusing. For someone like Chris, it makes little sense, they'd probably would just add modal editing packages to their existing config. Even though Spacemacs and Doom are still valuable - one can find many interesting gems there.

Also, these projects may give you a good discipline for structuring your keys mnemonically - everything files related would be at "SPC f", search stuff on "SPF s", etc.

Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

I see the author is spring cleaning:

> I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance.

https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df275005769b654618...

> I am no longer using Mutt nor running my own mail server. In general less terminal stuff for me.

https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/e331e367c75f66aaa9...

LLMs have inspired a similar change in me: with a big change in how I work, I feel I can and should be more flexible with adopting new tech, which involving freeing myself of previous choices.

For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it

solid extension, big fan

FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically.

LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test things, I even made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just simply run it, but to actually play it without losing. It was insane.

Also, Emacs is all about plain text - you can easily extract text from anything - from the browser, terminal, CLI apps, Slack, Jira, etc., and you can do that on your own terms - context can appear in a buffer, in your clipboard, become a file or series of API requests. That is really hard to beat.

This is what gives me the most pause.

I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good.

I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved.

I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it.

All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config².

Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples?

—

¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions

² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai

I'm still exploring all the ways the agent and I can collaborate using Emacs as a shared medium, but at the moment am super optimistic about it.

My .emacs config has improved and I wrote my own Emacs based coding agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent

Very true. There's an enormous tacit knowledge gap. Check this out:

I have to use Mac for work. My WM is Yabai, which is controlled via Hammerspoon (great tool on its own), which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have a Lisp REPL. MCP connected to that REPL can query and inspect every single window I have on my screen. It can move them around, it can resize them, it can extract some properties of them. It's figuring out stuff like: "pick a selected Slack thread from the app and send it into an Emacs buffer", or "make my app windows work like Emacs buffers" - pick from the list and swap it in place. Or "find the HN thread about retiring from Emacs among my browser tabs and summarize the content"...

Never in my life have I been more grateful to my younger self for grokking the philosophy of Lisp. Recent months have only reinforced my firm belief that this 70-year-old tech is truly everlasting. Thank you, John McCarthy, for the great gift to humanity, even though so weirdly underappreciated.

https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/

this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.

When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.

From the linked post:[0]

> I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional capacity I no longer write code myself. My current situation was unimaginable to me only a year ago. Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. Turns out I like it, and having tasted the future I don’t want to go back to the old ways.

It's deeply distressing to watch people fall into AI psychosis. Being smart, accomplished, or experienced is no defence.

After the bubble pops and the industry realises the damage these tools can do to people, folks like the author will have to confront that they were taken in by a lie. Many won't be able to confront that.

[0]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/

Perhaps you're confusing "not using AI" with "not being dependent on AI", those are very different things.

The edge isn't from avoidance, it's from using AI as leverage on top of real skill. A strong developer + AI beats a strong developer alone, and massively beats a weak developer + AI. The edge doesn't come from avoiding a tool - it comes from being the kind of person who doesn't need it but uses it anyway. That's leverage. Refusing to use it is just leaving leverage on the table to make a philosophical point.

> After the bubble pops

People like Chris (who is enormously capable engineer) would just move onto different tools, different techniques and paradigms. That is the essence of being a software developer - many of us choose this path specifically because it forces you to learn something new, every single day. That is (I suspect) also another reason why Wellons decided to migrate away from Emacs - he just learned it so deeply, perhaps it's no longer giving him the satisfaction of learning. Which to be honest is hard to believe - Emacs is a boundless playground, there's always something new to learn there.

It's unclear what you're saying here... Yes, AI-induced psychosis is a real problem and the frontier labs' mitigations are ineffective, to put it mildly. But using AI as a coding tool doesn't have anything to do with psychosis.

Anyone who has actual corporate team lead or management experience understand AI as effectively a junior dev who doesn't have great persistent memory. These devs using AI are reviewing, guiding, and validating the work given to them by AI just as they would from a junior dev.

The inverse of your statement is more apt; it's distressing to see people so angsty about AI usage. There are going to be skilless vibecoders and then there are going to be experienced devs (like OP) who figured out their AI workflow to multiply their productivity 2-5x.

What the future holds for AI model pricing-- that is a valid concern. But I don't think that's what you intended.

Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI, so if you're still not, that's a PEBKAC. You are not using the tools correctly. Figure it out before you complain.

>You are not using the tools correctly.

Stop being deluded, man.

When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys.

Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?

Absolutist rubbish.

> "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security."

As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).

???

Saying they have psychosis is a rude exaggeration.

Maybe a lot of people who are doing that aren't admitting that they've stopped writing code, but when all you're ever doing is manually fixing a few lines, or moving blocks of code to more sensible places, fixing jumbled parameters in a call and such, you're not really writing code anymore. You're now a chef in a kitchen yelling at assistants and just touching things when dealing with communicating a correction to one of those dimwits is more frustrating than just doing it yourself.

You still have to be a cook to be a chef, though. But the reason I say that AI is dumb is because I tell it to do things, it does them in a dumb way, and I complain at it and tell it to write it in a sensible way. It screws that up, and I tell it to do it again, and not to screw it up. I'm still not coding. If it goes into a loop of nonsense, I touch things with the intention of doing just enough to knock it out of that loop (or rather keep the new context from falling into it.)

"After the bubble pops" we might see that a lot of new chefs can't actually afford assistants. But just as likely, the overbuilt (government-subsidized directly and through policy) capacity might end up getting written off, and at the cost of electricity and maintenance costs could stay reasonably good. Or algos improve. Or training methods improve.

this is just like being promoted from developer to manager. some people like it some don't. with AI there is another dimenstion: some people like managing machines instead of people, some don't.

it's not for me. i don't want to stop writing code. i don't mind to manage people but i don't want to manage machines (at least not with an unprecise interface/outcome as AI provides). consequently AI may be fine for this person, but it is not for me.

Anyone know of something like this?

    (setq user-emacs-directory (format "~/.emacs.d/magit/%s/" emacs-version))
    (setq custom-file (concat user-emacs-directory "custom.el"))
    (setq make-backup-files nil)
    (setq auto-save-default nil)
    (setq create-lockfiles nil)
    (setq inhibit-startup-screen t)
    (setq initial-scratch-message nil)

    (require 'magit)
    (defun setup-standalone-magit ()
      (magit-project-status)
      (delete-other-windows))
    (add-hook 'after-init-hook 'setup-standalone-magit)

    #!/bin/sh
    if [ "$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree)" = "true" ]; then
        exec emacs -nw -q --no-splash -l "/path/to/magit-init.el"
    fi

https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.aganzha.Stage

The IntelliJ git client is my favorite by far, I am curious what do you not like about it?

For you, perhaps.

What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time.

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

This sounds like unsubstantiated hyperbole - can we keep HN grounded in reality, please?

My alternative hypothesis - you don't like agentic coding or maybe LLMs in general. Not helpful for the group.

Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue looking 100-150 years back that industrial fishing was not "the future of the fishing industry". That is also why programmers won't ever disappear because of AI progress. Just like we still need fishermen, we'd need programmers. The sad truth about this is that soon we truly may have no need for fishermen, because there's no fish left in the ocean.

- The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological.

- The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again.

- Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such):

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

[1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.

I've been using it since 1994.

Whoa, shit, I'm old.

I also suspect it allows easier consolidation. Moving from a deprecated lib to a new (and better) one for example.

Implementations will likely homogenize a bit as well, but on the other hand boy am I glad not to see an increasing amount of bizarre naïve hand-rolled implementations for some things.

Because deep down they are incomparable categorically. Separate the tools from the foundational ideas and you see the very different value. Vim-model of text navigation is fantastic, practical, brilliant idea. Once you grok it - you can take it anywhere. You can use it in your editor, browser, terminal, WM. Emacs is rooted in another, even more brilliant idea of practical notation for lambda calculus. These ideas have no overlap. But understanding the philosophy of each (ideally both) could open so many different possibilities.