> [W]e are here to declare our intent to use and develop a version of Emacs that is free from LLM-generated contributions regardless of whatever policy GNU decides upon. We invite them to weigh the costs and do the right thing, in which case we will continue to support them. But if they are not willing to do so, we will continue to use and develop an LLM-free version of Emacs anyway, even if it is not GNU Emacs.<p><a href="https://human-emacs.org/" rel="nofollow">https://human-emacs.org/</a>
<p><pre><code> > I believe a sufficiently interested emacs developer with a</code></pre>
$100 plan and a long weekend could hammer out a pretty good first cut.
That no one's yet done it is clear evidence that no one really wanted
these things so much as they wanted to talk about it.<p>The disappearance of bikeshedding doesn't look like an obvious one but it's a huge loss. Imagine if every scientist resolved to refer to already written books and carry on their research in closed labs with no discussion with the rest of their field.
Yeah, I look for opportunities to replace personal vibe-coded utilities with public projects for this reason.<p>Software still feels like this grand exploration to me—what's the best way to use a computer? What's the best way to express a program?—and a hackable text editor epitomizes that ethos (though I'm partial to neovim myself). Every time I install a plugin, I feel like I'm participating in a clinical trial of UX design.<p>I think a lot of us feel this, and the community will have to solidify the ethos that trying out other peoples' software is noble and healthy, exposing you to their ideas, even if it's actually harder and worse in some ways than vibecoding.<p>(I also think, by extension, the OSS community will need a more developed ethics of project governance. This was a hot issue even before AI, e.g. the terraform license change. But when the default is a vibe-coded bubble, authors will need to communicate either<p>1. this is just code—use at your own risk, PR at your own risk, or<p>2. this is a community, here's what we want for/from users, here's what we want for/from contributors, here's how to get involved in maintainance/governance.<p>You can be either but you have to say which.)
There's a principle I can't describe clearly. But one instance of it is the homogenization due to cheap(or free) instantaneous communications. Slow and limited created space and time to share, and incentives to do so because you needed to discuss with others to get or form new knowledge. Now everyone refers to the same source (see the evolution of design, choice of colors). Limits are protective in a way.
> Imagine if every scientist resolved to refer to already written books and carry on their research in closed labs with no discussion with the rest of their field.<p>Open source projects have always had forks, public and private. The ability to fork a project and use your own version of it privately, without needing permission or buy-in from others, has always been an explicitly valued aspect of open source software. If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?<p>I think the reason is an implicit assumption that the production of more unshared work means that less work will be shared. But I don't see why that would be true. We could just as easily, and more likely in my view, see more work shared with the world at the same time we see more work not shared with the world. The incentives for cooperation remain, even as it becomes easier to work alone.<p>Has anyone made a persuasive argument to the contrary, or provided evidence? It seems like the main problem AI has created for open source projects is an avalanche of bad PRs, not a drying up of good contributions.
“AI has turned Stallman's goal of software
freedom on its head. Having your computer do whatever your
imagination can think up -- that's real freedom. The only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.”
You don't understand Stallman then. Now you are dependent on closed source from closed source AI vendors. True software freedom would then being able to dissassemble the bot writing your code.
No one knows how the open source models work either.
Even if the model was open source, nobody would still know how the generated code works. You wouldn't even really know in want interesting sense of the word why the model produced the output you got.
Open source really should mean open training dataset, not merely open weights. There are some truly open source models and you can reproduce their training process if you have the compute. I can't think of a reason why those kinds of models would be incompatible with Stallmanism. Presumably they will get better and more widespread over time, like free software
LLMs are even more proprietary than regular proprietary software, I think you've got it right here. They are destroying the free software movement and it seems like most people don't even realize what's happening.
LLMs are a fundamentally different category of thing to software. Developing them is closer to breeding cows than writing code.
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The damage isn't restricted to software. AI is the intellectual equivalent of asbestos.<p>Asbestos is an amazing fire retardant. That's why nearly every building built before we knew how cancerous it was contains it.
"Being dependent on a small number of AI vendors, who also penetrate every aspect of your life to control, report, and spy upon you, forced to use AI at work or be laid off, or just be made redundant and let off anyway, while drowing in slop from every corner of social media, news, youtube, search results, and any other cultural production -- that's real freedom!"
I'm also not sure how that ended up the definition of real freedom. Maybe some Spinoza is in order but genuine freedom is proper understanding of one's own, and others, nature and causes. That is to say one is free to the extent that one has adequate knowledge.<p>To live in ignorance, that is to be pushed, pulled or compelled by what you don't understand, for example because you've outsourced your life to the magical mystery programming box, is in his terminology bondage.<p>Which also explains why all these AI psychosis people sound like crack addicts. Stallman is still completely correct about what software freedom is
I would guess that for most people AI still promotes this definition of freedom.<p>The modern world is too complex for anyone to understand all topics fully. So as a result of this cognitive cap, by Spinoza's definition people have grown progressively less free for centuries. AI can, for anyone who seeks it, allow easy access to fields where they previously would have to consult with a human expert in order to begin to understand. Coding agents arguably make coding more accessible then it's ever been, it's just that as a side effect they make understanding less necessary to produce software (and thus also less valuable). Any schmuck can now ask an agent "hey how does this program work" and get a competent answer in terms they can parse. Of course, most people do not do this. Human beings, as a general rule, do not do things they don't have to. But the option is there.<p>As a board saturated with experts, people here on HN don't tend to appreciate what kind of incredible super power vibe coding is for people who did not pursue an education and career in software engineering. Everything that a computer can do is now accessible to everyone. As the vast majority of people on earth would not and could not spend the time and effort to understand software (or simply don't have the talent to do so), this is a pure upgrade in terms of average freedom.
Other ones being to keep paying the AI bros in perpetuity, and having all your prompts, data, and IP getting stolen by the same people with the goal of eventually undermining your own ability to think. We will all be as free as the people living in Pods in Matrix.
It's a whole new world.<p>We need to be thinking about modularity with well-defined APIs now,
to isolate the chunks created by AI coding. Maintainabilty requires firewalls.
Strong isolation where it matters, completely free otherwise.
Isn't that just... software engineering?
I more or less agree with the article but we can move it one step further. Nowadays we don't even need text editors no matter how advanced they are. I am a VS Code user and I have not opened VS Code in more than 3 months because I don't need it anymore. Opening a text editor and editing code by hand seems like so ... yesterday.<p>This definitely is a new era and, personally, I love it! (Also I have broken my right arm so I can't write code even if I wanted to. I'm dictating this text.)
I was saying almost this same thing to a coworker. I'm building something that's like Emacs, but for agents, and it's mostly a Markdown-forward tool for managing all the agents and agent coding harnesses, and it's a vendor-agnostic things....If anything it's like a newer, faster, fancier org-mode, but knows how to inject all the right context into all the agentic projects.<p>This, after configuring Emacs to talk to LLMs. But that's not the right angle now for me....
I mostly use Emacs not to write code, though. In fact, getting Claude to do explorations for me and output its findings as org docs is <i>fantastic</i>.
Emacs is not an advanced text editor, it's more like an OS. I run Claude Code inside emacs (with the claude-code-ide package). I seriously think LLMs will usher in a new golden era for emacs because you can now reap all the benefits without having to learn elisp.
I did, with another package, but running Claude inside a terminal has no glitches and I seldom have to edit code anymore. I'm using emacs almost only to edit md files in which I make Claude write analysis and plans. I make changes, add clarifications, we iterate. Most of the times the chat is enough. I remember that I discovered that I broke Ruby autocompletion only weeks after I did (I investigated the cause.) Maybe notepad would be enough but I stick to emacs. I am about to get to 40 years of marriage with it.
Yeah. AIs let you exist without learning. A great advance for the brainless.
Loved it.<p>> But there's one glaring headscratcher, and that's its full-blown,
self-contained implementation of a terminal emulator, in Rust no less. In the before times, a developer would undoubtedly seek such a heavy
lift from off-the-shelf kit, but the holmes replicated over a
coffee break what a billionaire with infinite resources had been
toiling over the last five years.<p>Is this really true, though? Did model improvement since Ghostty began simply eclipse Ghostty and anything achievable with that now "legacy" code base? Would that project be better off abandoned or started over from scratch with Opus 5.5? Or is there something more there?<p>These are honest questions.
"We may have felt safe bringing a gun to a knife fight, but now everyone's just sending a drone." Perfectly said. For those of us concerned about editor efficiency, it's hard to know where to go from here. For years I'd been working on a design tool that was inspired by Vim - entirely keyboard driven using mnemonic keychords. But LLMs really took the wind out of my sails, because eh, why bother now? Somewhere deep down I feel that it's still viable, because I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important. I just don't know if it will be considered important by everyone else.
> "I want it to be true that perfectly deterministic tooling is still important."<p>Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.<p>It is almost hypocritical for AI enthusiasts to say we don't need to look at code anymore, while everything they do is build on piles and piles of infrastructure and tools that are carefully hard-coded, deterministic building blocks. The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.<p>I am just constantly baffled by people thinking that because we can make (crappy) end-user apps and one-off tools, no one needs to code anymore. Does anyone build solid tools and libraries? Does anyone still get pleasure from building a rock solid, snappy app?<p>I can feel all the AI coded apps and website turning to ever buggier sludge under my fingertips, and people are rejoicing that this is the way of the future.<p>I refuse. I will not touch Claude.
> <i>The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.</i><p>I think this is an interesting hypothesis and want to see what happens. I'm not really willing to go all the way to vibecoding, because I want to understand the system design. But I do have bots writing all the new code.
I understand the sentiment. I do think it's important to experience it for yourself - not to convince you (I'm less and less convinced as the months go by) - but just to understand the visceral feeling that leads people into AI psychosis.<p>At times it feels literally magical. But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.
><i>Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.</i><p>Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.
> RMS appeared in a recent video recounting his CSAIL work on a circuit analyzer in which he, and I'm paraphrasing, "didn't model the circuit as a system of equations to be solved, but rather approached it much as a human would" by applying a series of diagnostics.<p>bitter-lesson-pilled RMS before GTA VI
> Whither now, we ask -- now that we have, even to my
jaded eye, a god machine that makes short work of all the stuff we
emacsers believed we were faster at than people using lesser tools.
Editing speed, customization, the expressiveness of LISP: every
advantage we claimed vanished the moment we stopped typing and started
telling the AI what we wanted.<p>Is that a common thought? I learned vim, then emacs, and various other tooling not because I wanted to increase my speed competitively, but just to reduce my frustration with the gap between thinking and doing. Using something like VSCode to code is like playing on a laggy piano (if that exists). You think about I need to quickly update the signature of this function and it turns into a mouse/keyboard chaotic dance with your eyes focusing all over the place. It's like doing a three legged race.<p>With emacs and vim, I think about the code, notice that I want to change to change something, and can do the necessary actions (almost) subconsciously. Which means, I never stop thinking about the code. It may be longer or faster than someone using another software, but the advantage for me is to rely mostly on muscle memory while I'm thinking deeply about some problems.<p>Another thing is multiple buffer/views at once. This is why I don't like editors that have vim mode, because it's a pain to browse code with them, especially when you want a global view of something. With both emacs and vim, I can have multiple related files/sections of files/output of commands visible at once. Like how you would want physical papers and lay them on a desk.
Yeah, I think framing in terms of 'effort' or 'flow' might make more sense than 'speed' here.<p>If you expect that you can complete some task just from the keyboard, then the idea of having to use the mouse interrupts what you're doing.<p>The original post gives "stage and commit in git" as an example. Magit is much nicer than CLI, since you can quickly invoke the actions you want; it's less effort than typing out the full command on the CLI. -- With LLM coding agents, getting an LLM agent to make a commit is slower than doing it yourself in magit (if all you're going to do is stage and commit), but it's much less effort.
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Is it too much to ask to format your text in the middle aligned?<p>Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.<p>HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.
> sealed up transistors can reproduce the same outputs given the same inputs
with unerring precision. The power to unambiguously differentiate an
on- versus an off-signal -- the binary "digital" -- might seem
trivial, but is 100% the reason why we're so comfortable handing over
the reins to computers.<p>Is the author not familiar with the ECC memory business?
> The irony is rich that AI has turned Stallman's goal of software freedom on its head. Having your computer do whatever your imagination can think up -- that's real freedom. The only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.<p>Why are people so sure this will keep scaling? We're still so far away from me being able to get anything even remotely close to what I can imagine using a free model running on hardware I own.<p>Then you need to remember there are a lot of very powerful people currently invested in not letting us have any of this, so I really don't think it's time to call free software irrelevant yet.
>ut at the time, rules-based
programming was still novel enough to be considered a viable approach
to AI.<p>Pick MLite from <a href="https://t3x.org" rel="nofollow">https://t3x.org</a> and you'll get it pretty fast. Or with invariants under Lisp. Or its weird cousing, CLIPS, born from Common Lisp clauses.<p>On code quality, Neomacs (an Emacs clone in Rust, it has Elisp support) crashes a lot. And by a lot, I mean once you hit the menu with the mouse, it segfaults.<p>>he only catch is
you'll have no idea how it works. No one does.<p>Is not about the rules, but the relations. It's a network of clauses, and not something akin to if-then-else with flow controlling. There's no actual "flow".
> Neomacs crashes a lot<p>It's a highly experimental thing someone decided to mess around with, without any prior design discussion with any Emacs core devs. It's like a forty-minute-old baby and you're asking it to parallel park without crashing. What's your point here, I don't get it?<p>GNU/Emacs is incredibly stable. It's one of the most reliable pieces I've ever had; I sometimes run it for months without ever restarting. Which I can't say about pretty much any app on my system. Including the system itself.
I'm still not using AI to do more than get me in the door with finding new features, like: "tell me how to get my matplotlib output into tiff".<p>The AI tooling seems too unstable still.
Here's a fun question - if AI is trained on OSS, particularly with licenses that are copy left... wouldn't that make all the code it generates copy left? wouldn't that mean the weights themselves should all be open sourced.
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The whole idea of free software seems quaint.<p>Like demanding commented machine code between 1985 and 2025.<p>Sure you can get it, but that's not where the software lives even if it's how the software runs.<p>Reverse engineering closed source software is the simplest thing in the world now. The only reason why more of it isn't done is because it's so boring even minding the AI isn't worth most people's time.
Fable 5.2 is designing entire devices now, from PCB layout to case assembly.<p>If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude. Get into business. The only way you're going to make it is to join the ownership class. Or pick up a torch or pitchfork and join the revolution.
> join the ownership class<p>...which is rapidly running away from you. Ignore this nonsense and do useful work. It will be okay.
This is such a wrong way of looking at it. The fact that AI is getting better and giving us better toolings is more of a reason to go and get an education.
AI is not a tool. It's a service.<p>Tools are an extension of your mind. AI is becoming like unto a mind of its own. It's taking the power to make decisions away, rather than speeding your execution on such decisions. Note that by "decisions" I don't mean just higher-level decisions, but the micro-decisions about details that go into crafting a thing also. And we're being told oh, just accept this new layer of abstraction (on top of all the others). And don't worry about the details anymore, the machine does them so much better. I mean, sure you can work at a detailed level with an LLM, but on the job they'll PIP you for not just trusting the dark factory. Judgement is the new moat. Wait, Opus 5.5 is pretty good at that too; business context is the <i>new</i> new moat. It's just an upward retreat into fewer and fewer, less and less concrete decisions made by people, until engineering simply isn't done by people anymore; there's only a need for human business people, product managers, and QA testers. And then AI starts coming for their jobs too, especially since the CEO has been using ChatGPT to do product-market fit analysis for what potential things we might ship to maximize profitability over the next FY...<p>As for university, I actually don't really know what to tell kids these days. Many of them will succumb to pressure to keep their GPA up, and use AI to cheat to ensure that they do. So <i>whatever</i> they choose, unless they are super disciplined, super honest, and super incentivized to come by their degree without cheating, they won't get a whole lot of learning out of it. Especially not for the money they're spending now.
> If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude<p>I hope you are not advising any young people out there.