Terrible analogy. Emacs has always had comparably fewer major options for packages compared to other tools, there is often an obvious option based on your needs, and it has never been my experience that people decide to just roll their own versions of everything. The author has clearly never used neovim or now pi. NPM packages in general would have also been a way better example.

Edit: Sure there is some small overlap here, but it's really not comparable and definitely not like the way the author describes things. User personalization in Emacs has normally been on a much smaller scale than rewriting entire packages. Configuration is generally smaller tweaks or things on top of existing packages because Emacs provides cohesive extensibility to the point that it often doesn't require "rolling your own." Most packages are already extremely configurable and tailorable. You don't magically get that sort of environment with LLMs. Emacs is much more cooperative/generalized.

The scale and type of custom/personalized software we're seeing now with AI is completely different from how things have been in Emacs. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing (I think it's both), but it's very different from Emacs and definitely more comparable to something like vim/neovim where (in part just because of the sheer popularity) you constantly have people "rolling their own" packages and a billion versions of everything. Even that is not a great analogy. This is something completely new.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seriously, your idea here is maybe you can start an Emacs vs. vi fight in the comment threads?

	▲	noctuid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No one mentioned vi, I like neovim just fine, and I'm using pi daily. Nice try though. My only point is that if you want to talk about rewriting everything yourself, NIH, churn, whatever you want to call it, Emacs is absolutely not a great example.

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jr_isidore 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are we reading the same article? OP is saying LLMs let normies tweak their personal workflows in the same way we emacs nerds had been doing for decades. Contrary to the old saw about it being an OS, Emacs is really just a shell but with lisp as its command language instead of unwieldy bash. Once Claude magicked an English to bash translator, raw shell has caught up to emacs in its ease of use.

	▲	noctuid 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The new thing where everyone just vibe codes their own versions of everything is not at all like personalizing Emacs. Specifically the idea that people generally just ignore existing versions of packages and make their own has never been the case, especially compared to other editors (even VSCode). > There are popular elisp packages lots of people use. But except for Magit, nerds are alarmingly apt to replace them with their own shinier versions (and then to show them off, transitioning to the spore-forming phase of the elisp lifecycle). Everything in Emacs is malleable. > Until now, the Achilles heel of Emacs culture has been that, except for Magit, its packages tend to be wretched user experiences. Ugly, slow, and discoverable only after inflicting years of elisp cortical injuries on yourself.