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.

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.