> The example you describe is something I would rarely do

There is some tacit knowledge in here that is nearly impossible to convey in words. Your "rarely do" is the thought that subconsciously ignores the principle of least effort; there's an affordability gap, e.g., I am more likely to use a thesaurus simply because I have it built into my text editor, versus someone who has to reach for it in the browser/separate app.

> building a process around it would be inefficient for me

That's what you're missing. Emacs makes it incredibly cheap. It's a Lisp REPL. When you understand what it means in practice, it opens up incredible opportunities for exploratory computing. You're not "building processes around", you're essentially living in one mega-process, a simulation, a digital universe where you are a god, commanding change at will. Right now, as I'm typing this very comment, I noticed a tiny gap in the way how I'm using LLMs, so I'm changing this stuff on the fly, with the agent running things in the adjacent buffer while I'm finishing this comment. The crazy thing is that it doesn't have to compile, restart, ask me to pause typing, etc. It's applying changes to my editor live. By the time I finish typing the comment, it will probably have already built this feature, tested it out, and it will be ready for me to use, instantly.