I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years.<p>These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too.<p>It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.
Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.