The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes...

That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.

Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.

But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?

I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.

That's going to be huge thing in the future I think

Everyone having their own hyperspecific apps or even different UIs/visualization in the same app

The whole idea of an application becomes a much more fluid thing

If your app is built with a dynamic language why not let users re-write the code themself and add whole new features

It’s exactly what I use LLMs for as a non-computer professional.

LLMs are great for problem exploration. Especially with the decline of Google I think we're at a point where it's less difficult to get an LLM to spit out something that'll accomplish a task sorta compared to actually finding that on the internet. But if the task is going to be repeated or modified then I think LLMs are at a permanent disadvantage to prebuilt software. Even if that prebuilt software is just someone else running an LLM and then passing the output through acceptance testing most people just don't want the headache of debugging weird edge cases and the novelty of "I'm a developer too!" wears off pretty quickly.

I'm excited that the weird grey-zone of excel sheets with business critical logic is likely going to disappear as LLMs slowly make the logic driving those too complex to be comprehended and managed and those get foisted off onto actual engineering resources. It'll be painful but probably for the best... but for actual tools people need to use day-to-day I think the assurance that the tool will work has a lot more value than the AI hype has comprehended.

My fears with the situation you are describing is that we end up without a common file format, if everyone has a propietary app and/or file system then that makes transition or collaboration a pain.

We probably won't end there due to how lazy most of us are, but it's certainly something to consider

The dislike of code per se is what drives these people to use agents in the first place.

Yes. You can do that. It works right now. It works really well.

My original spicy take is: why learn SwiftUI at all at this point? It's a skill that, for most tasks, falls into the same kind of bucket as "learning Microsoft Word really, really well". I appreciate people who take the time to do that, but the outcomes are within millimeters of each other whether or not we do that.

I don't think that's true of programming generally. But I think there are languages now where the rationale in specializing in them has gotten, hrm, more complicated.

> Especially with the decline of Google

Oddly enough, Google’s LLM is the only one that has been answering my questions well on a research project these last weeks. I’m getting information from scanned text files that exist on the internet but were never adequately OCRed by other LLM companies (i.e. both OCRed at all, and moreover OCRed as the specific language in question that picks up all the diacritics). Google search results may be disappointing and polluted for years, but the company is still offering a useful product in another tab of its interface.

> It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it.

Arguably LLMs take us further away from that than we've ever been. All they do is automate copying and pasting in shit from StackOverflow.

We were closer to everyone being able to learn how to program computers in the mid-80s when everyone had one and they started up with a BASIC prompt.

I'm the same.

In all honesty, when you start up emacs for the first time with a blank config, it looks terrible. But then you start building it up with plugins and adding code to support your own quirky workflows and slowly it becomes too powerful in your life to ignore. I have not been able to drop it for 13 straight years. With AI taking over the development experience, emacs and neovim have only become even better, because now you can get AI to bake your custom workflows into the config for you.

Emacs/neovim should be the gold standard for all workflow tools.

Setting aside the fact that good content is more enjoyable than bad content, experiences are meant to be shared. Humans are a social species, and a very large part of media consumption goes beyond the actual consumption and into sharing that experience with other people. People build communities around the media they like, and even integrate their favorites as part of their identity, wearing branded clothes or cosplay, decorating their rooms with merch, setting wallpapers, and so many other ways to signal what they enjoy to others. "Content creation for one" rather misses how humans work. Heck, not only media but even tools are subject to this -- people legitimately make emacs or vi part of their personality.

> The entire economic model of content creation and distribution is going to explode in the next 3 or 4 years

I think this is also inherently self-contradictory. What's the point of distributing content made for one? This gets into the same fallacy that people engage in w.r.t. "applications for one" displacing software developers. Yes, LLMs can pump out buggy software that suits one person's needs, and it doesn't need to be reliable enough to deploy at scale. It serves real utility here, because there was a gap between "the value of such software" and "what software developers are willing to work for", which meant that this software wasn't being created because there wasn't economic value in it. But then, how does one suppose software that has no economic value is going to replace all the professional software developers who were being paid to produce software that has economic value? LLMs filled a gap software developers weren't being paid to do, but given that they were not paid to do it, their jobs are not contingent on the existence of this niche. It simply doesn't follow that being able to produce content with zero economic value, whether that's applications or content for one, will cause an 'explosion' in the existing economic models.

I suggest you switch to Org mode, then :-)

The post talks about this.

Curios. What are you responding to?

I've found Gemini to be very helpful in figuring out all the fiddly linux problems that used to require reading endless forum posts and digging through docs.

I'm with you on purpose-built disposable tools, but who wants to read a disposable book, or watch a disposable movie?

Not me. I'm enthralled by what this moment promises for building software, but I'm yicked out the same way everyone else is by generative art.

I have told this to many friends who scoff at me, but using a computer is very clearly going to also mean "having the computer create programs for you". We won't even think or know about it.

To me, it isn't a matter of if, and the matter of when is also very clearly in "at most 10 years, probably much, much earlier", given that I have relatives already doing this without knowing how to code.

This is a future of computing I am absolutely in love with, and is so incredibly empowering!

I did the same. I started with Doom Emacs and then a year later decided to start from scratch and build the computing environment I wanted. But I think the experience of Doom showed me what was possible, what I liked, and what I really had no need for.

I make small config changes every day and its super fun to use my computer this way. I wish everything was configurable like Emacs.

No, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that.

So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

“Those who say they lack time to build tools are precisely the ones who cannot afford not to.”

It is! That's the post!

Nothing personal but I hate this take with a passion, and I literally think it's representative of the worst attitude in computing because it's the literal opposite of software SHOULD BE.

The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."

I know, right? Org-mode is soooo much more practical. imenu works great, sparse-trees are awesome, you can edit pretty much any part¹ in an indirect buffer and all. These days I try to consume anything that can be fit into an outline, in org-mode - hackernews², reddit³, slack⁴, jira boards and tickets⁵, wiktionary entries⁶, etc.

Fun anecdote - I once needed to sort some nested items in a big yaml file. After spending three minutes trying to understand sort-regexp-fields (or some other function), I cheated - I ran org-mode, and then org-sort and then went back to yaml-mode. So stupid, yet so brilliant. Why the heck would I ever want to use "first-class IDE" or "intuitive, plebeian editor" if Emacs has anything I could possibly imagine? Right at my fingertips.

___

¹ https://github.com/agzam/org-edit-indirect.el

² https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader/

³ https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-reddigg

⁴ https://github.com/agzam/slacko.el

⁵ https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el

⁶ https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el

> When my Emacs opens a markdown file it immediately converts it into OrgMode format.

I want that. Can you give some details?

A search finds modeverv/markdown-to-org which looks 80% there but activates based on a yank or converting an already loaded markdown buffer. Perhaps it can be made to apply on opening a .md file.

I feel like I'm way more cynical than most people around here about LLMs but if we accept the parent comment's framing, why can't we just use an LLM to write a throw-away converter to whatever new format is necessary? Yes of course it'll probably be lossy occasionally but the question will be, is that ok for the user doing the conversion?

Tarver's piece was new to me, and fun, and spot on. Yes, LLMs bring the emacs cruft heap to the masses. A throwaway culture on disk is a lot less worrisome than one on soil.

Ah yes, the 80s, when everyone had a computer.

> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type.

In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose.

I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.

Same thing, actually, I think.

I think that "the number of programs" you're suggesting is arbitrary. It's kind of like calling an operating system one thing, when it's a lot of things. You can "count" the things different ways.

The bigger takeaway is "making your own programming things."

Generally I just don't appreciate when someone jumps from "I care about this" to "everyone cares about this for obvious reasons." Focus on what something means to you, and being sincere about it. But that is just my advice for writing, take it or leave it.

Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas.

And more power to people for embracing agency :)

I agree, but I don't think the author of this blog post is coming from that perspective, and markdown renderers of the sort described in the post tend to do pretty poorly with math typesetting.

The article provides an analogy, it doesn't tell you to do anything with Emacs in particular.

Besides being an everything app for you, Emacs is an (unconventional) operating system with weak boundaries between user apps. It makes it easy to modify anything, write new things, or combine two existing ones with very little code, something that e.g. Microsoft could have only dreamed of in Office with its awkward embedding that barely worked. Emacs is one the few survivors of the idea that users should program what they need, which was popular during the personal computing revolution in the 80's. Two others are spreadsheets and BASIC.

Programming turned out to be too complex for the untrained users to handle, but AI makes the idea of custom one-off apps or weird hybrids pretty damn close, that is true in practice. I see a lot of people that vibe code their own little things to get things done. That's precisely what BASIC (often shipped in the stock ROM!) was supposed to be used for.

It's usually easier to build something that maintain it for extended periods of time, particularly if that maintenance requires adding new features.

Less about the capabilities of LLM software, but more about my willingness to spend time to deploy them, debug them, etc.

I don't want to spend time on dealing with change. Hence why I'd rather purchase tools, where I pay for the developer to a) prepare for any maintenance, and b) will perform the maintenance needed.

(Of course, the maintainability of software with current generation LLMs depends a lot on how well your architecture them. I've got pure vibe coded slop, that can be very difficult to wrangle.)

me too! The peace of mind of getting any computer, cloning my config and feel at home.

> So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

I mean... yes?

Maintaining software means looking at issues opened on github, keeping your own list of feature requests and bug fixes, deciding if and what to fix, deciding when to fix, and if you're lucky/cursed, reviewing PRs from randos. ANY of this means diverting attention from your day job/client work/kids/???.

Can some of this be theoretically automated by an LLM? Uh, maybe? But I'm not sure how much that would help.

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.

Seriously, your idea here is maybe you can start an Emacs vs. vi fight in the comment threads?

> Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes?

I'm using Emacs since last century and I've got 3 000+ lines of custom Elisp code I wrote (with maybe only a few hundred lines copy/pasta'ed from other configs).

I'm always using a recent Emacs compiled from source and now with LSP, org-mode, Magit, tree-sitter, ivy/avy/counsel/swiper with ripgrep (thanks burntsushi) integration etc.

I had zero frigging idea what gfm and gfm-view for Emacs were.

But I'll look into it now!

The point of the article is that the whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface, and in that regard everything feels a lot more like Emacs.

It's not "about" Emacs, it's more about the vibe of personalized software in 2026 to someone who does a lot of Emacs stuff.

Monospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).

I have written multiple books entirely in LaTeX edited with neovim. So... your point is not taken.

Paralleling Linux and MacOS is pretty simple, but the last time I tried to make the same config work properly in Windows it was a nightmare b/c of the path issues.

Well, yeah. The home computer revolution.

Literally everyone had a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro if their parents were rich and thought that having the same as they had at school was a good idea.

One could argue that less density, as well as standardised widths, significantly reduces opportunity for error compared to cluttered text that is constantly varying how it is displayed. Perhaps moving your eyes more increases opportunity for error by 10% but easier-to-parse characters decreases the opportunity for error by 20%?

No one mentioned vi, I like neovim just fine, and I'm using pi daily. Nice try though. My only point is that if you want to talk about rewriting everything yourself, NIH, churn, whatever you want to call it, Emacs is absolutely not a great example.

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.

Sure, but it misses interoperability, which is the point of Emacs for me. That's my point.

I know, right? You'd be like "using Emacs like a boss", going with your keyboard "frrrrrrrr" (well, no, that's not Emacs, Emacs would be like "C-c C-c C-c C-c C-x 8 and only then frrrr"), managing entire k8s clusters, building it from the source using most esoteric build options, --with-fries-n-ketchup, and all. And then some jerk comes out of nowhere and tells you about fancy-pangolin-mode that's been sitting quietly in core Emacs since the Prohibition and you're like: "goddammm... I've been using it wrong, my life is meaningless..." :) We're old people. I mean, an eleven-year-old who opens Emacs becomes old in an instant. We have invented doom-scrolling. We've been going through the M-x menu way before twitter and reddit made it a thing.

I'm a fan of your writing, all the more because you've somehow managed to do all of it in monospace. :)

> whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface

Emacs-effect. Use it long enough and everything becomes "one big programmable surface". I've been in that modus operandi for years. Emacs is my "control room", I don't necessarily do everything in Emacs, but for sure it converges all into it - everything flows through Emacs. I control my WM directly from the REPL inside Emacs. I can grab a content from a tab in my browser - I have access to my browser history, and all the tabs, I can switch to any tab, close and re-order them. I can grab a text selection on the page, I can extract entire readable corpus of an article while ignoring all the irrelevant fluff - banners, ads, buttons, etc. It works even for js-rendered content (React, et al.). I play all videos controlling them directly from Emacs - even though the video itself is playing outside, in mpv. I still can pause, change volume, fast forward, speed-up, extract transcript, etc. All without leaving Emacs. That's pretty useful when taking notes. I can grab any text I see on the screen. Even if it's in Slack.app. Why, If I can read it, there's no reason why Emacs shouldn't be able to. I can grab any region on my screen with Flameshot, it goes through Emacs, runs tesseract and OCRs the text out of it. Useful when someone's screen sharing in Zoom. This was all possible before LLMs. Now, LLMs running in Emacs can do some crazy, wild stuff.

Not really the same. Emacs focus a lot on compatibility and common modules (even if there may be some different takes on those common things). So you got big systems like helm, consul, ivy, company,… and the. everyone building on top.

Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emacs make that easy by having a framework for user preferences. That makes for an extendable program.

The closest, but not as user friendly is unix and suckless philosophy combined. Small programs, easy to understand, configure, and extend.

Authoring is different from reading.

And why did you author them in LaTeX if you think reading in monospace plaintext is fine for everyone?

In the past when I've seen someone extolling Windows/Linux compatibility for something as complex as a detailed Emacs setup, they were using WSL or one of the wrappers like Cygwin rather than native Windows compiles of the tooling.

If you change "literally everyone" to "a minority" we can agree.

My house did not have a computer in it until 1992. I knew many people who did not have a computer in the house in the 1980s. Computers were expensive!

Wild!! Would love to look at your .emacs.d configs

Even in the early 80s they were 100 quid, that was nothing.

OP is trying to say Home Depot let normies do their own small repairs, and you're protesting saying "No, no, that's not how we pros do it."

Well, no, because it wasn't a minority.

They were cheap and ubiquitous, unless I suppose you were in one of "Iron Curtain" countries.

For whatever it's worth, I've always only ever used the native Windows build of Emacs, and I've never had any awful problems sharing my config between Windows, Linux and macOS. I'm sure I had to expend at least a bit of effort to make this work initially, but it wasn't enough for the process to stick in my mind, and the ongoing effort doesn't feel like it's added up to much.

(I admit it's added up to more than zero though! Keeping (require 'cmake-mode) working reliably on Windows and macOS has proven a minor annoyance, and fonts seem to require a degree of system-specific attention.)

mpvi [1] is the video control part. I have only used it a little bit but it is incredibly good. Control the playback completely from Emacs and quickly make timestamped org notes.

I don't know what the other parts are. Curious to learn!

[1]: https://github.com/lorniu/mpvi

The problem is the dependencies, getting hunspell installed and finding the dictionary files for example. I normally only get a new computer every few years and each time stuff like that is a new pain. And dont even start with treesitter, i cant compile anything on windows and always end up using prebuild dlls.

Normies can do their own repairs when they want and how they want. But I was just pointing out a difference in behavior, not the true way of doing.

A quick google query says 15% of US households own a personal computer in 1989.

Okay, well, it was far more than that in the UK and Europe.

I suppose it's a bit like television, it would have been more popular where it was invented.

Around 5 million ZX Spectrums were sold between 1982 and 1992. If all were sold in the UK (they weren’t), that would put the penetration around 25% based on the number of households in 1990.

One specific model of ZX Spectrum, which is one specific make and model of home computer.

Did you live in the UK in the 1980s?