In my view, Emacs is getting more powerful in the AI era. The cost of writing Elisp has dropped significantly — I've ended up with 15+ personal Elisp packages as a result. The freedom Emacs offers is still unmatched. For example, I heavily rely on sending automatic response (https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code), monitoring repository, and targeted context building from dired.

Fully agree, but it is also the buffer based navigation approach that is just fantastic. I wish other programs would adopt this. Most applications use dedicated areas for various functions, instead of letting me just hit a key to bring the function to where I am currently looking.