I have to share this one.
Now don’t think of me as smug, I’m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: I’m pretty good at Vim. I’ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. I’ve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldn’t help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.
Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.
The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.
Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym...
In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the university’s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldn’t give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They don’t care. They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldn’t they? Next question. Concerns about “is this still the same programming that I fell in love with?” seemed so silly that I didn’t even dare to say them out loud.
SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this man's books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.
