Comment by monooso

I don't want to be too tsk-tsk here but please remember community standards here. Its not appropriate to assume bad faith and we should strive to be charitable in the comments section here [1]. Saying vim here is clearly in reference to article, where they have a whole section about it. To borrow some of that AI lingo, we are already sharing all the context here, why speak past me like this?

Further, the article does not mention "requirements," it mentions the "joy" of having software "fit" just you. It goes through I think a certain amount of care in the writing to say they are enabled by their system only insofar as there is a "satisfaction" to not dealing with something from without that is for a more general audience.

At the end of the day, life is what you spend time doing. I don't think the author or anybody really thinks cumulative time is saved one way or the other here. This is all a product of what we want to spend time doing. And I am just saying, that's recreational! It doesn't have to be the case that something is lesser if its not about maximizing productivity or making more money. Either you have a "decades-long" project configuring a system, or your spending a decade writing new software for you, that's a "quiet pleasure to use." It's clearly either way about the project of it. Do we really think anyone is going to vibe code a vim clone and, insofar as they use it, not continue to tinker with it? Isn't that like the whole upshot here? That you can make things forever?

A guy who uses i3/sway and rolls their own DE even before vibe coding world is already a particular kind of person with certain priorities and judgements about time! And that's cool! I am that kind of guy, fwiw.

A lot of people into the synthesizers and related stuff talk about so-called "gear acquisition syndrome," where, in the search for hardware that fits their "requirements" as serious musicians, the time (and money) they end up spending just getting new things ends up eclipsing time doing the actual thing (making music). Depending on how much money they have, this doesn't necessarily become bad, one just realizes they are maybe a synth collector more than a composer.

Even if I had all the AI money token blah blah in the world, I would still hesitate spending time rebuilding an IDE or editor on my weekends, because for me personally, that's time getting in the way of using the computer to make my things. Like I am hungry, I do not want to forge my own chef's knife first, but I do think the people that do have a kinda cool hobby! Or, if its about spending my weekend making an OS so that I can, come Monday, read work emails exactly how I want, well that just terrible to me but everyone has their own work-life balance I think.

Again, I am not trying to explain away or I guess be negative here. There are lots of kinds of people, that's ok! I think it's just interesting how we know traffic concepts of "time" and "productivity" and "serious computer work vs. recreational computer stuff" these days!

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html