Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

I am going to be that guy: Heraclitus did not write "The only thing that is constant is change." In related news, the pithy Plato, Aristotle, or Nietzsche quote that you find on the internet: they probably didn't write or say it. (LLMs will only make this worse, but the internet has always been flooded with bullshit attributions.)

Also, yes, Heraclitus definitely wrote some things about change, including one (in)famous thing about rivers. But his writings were famously hard to understand even in ancient Greece. Ancient Greeks and Romans regularly called him "unclear" and "obscure." Today, we understand him even less—in my opinion not at all—since his book only survives in fragments, often in quotation or paraphrase by authors hundreds of years later than Heraclitus himself.

To show how difficult it is to interpret Heraclitus, here's the fuller context of the rivers fragment. (I copied this from The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy, translated and edited by Daniel W. Graham, page 183; all numbers and emphases are from that edition.)

Concerning soul, Cleanthes as he is setting out the teachings of Zeno for comparison with those of other natural philosophers says that Zeno calls the soul sensation, or exhalation like Heraclitus. For wishing to show that souls being nourished by exhalations are always intelligent, he compares them to rivers, saying [62[F39]] On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. And souls too are nourished by moist exhalations. (3) Now Zeno like Heraclitus declares the soul to be an exhalation, and he says it is perceptive because the governing part of it (in terms of importance) is able to be impressed through sense organs by things that exist and subsist, and it is able to receive their impressions; for these things are proper to the soul.

Note that we have this fifth-hand. As Graham explains "In this complex passage, the Stoic Arius Didymus is reporting the account of the earlier Stoic Cleanthes expounding the view of his teacher, Zeno of Citium, and citing Heraclitus in the process—all preserved in Christian historian Eusebius. More succinctly: Eusebius paraphrases Arius Didymus who paraphrases Cleanthes who paraphrases Zeno who quotes (but probably only in paraphrase) Heraclitus. There is nearly nothing left of Heraclitus beyond little scraps, and many of those scraps come us in this complicated multi-step way.

tl;dr: Nobody knows what Heraclitus meant, though it is fun to read his fragments. (Re that, I recommend Graham's The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy for a deep dive or Jonathan Barnes's Early Greek Philosophy for a book you can carry easily.)

Good article. Personally, I don't buy the vterm buffer example: I think we get tighter semantic coupling, not two programs sitting next to each other.

One thing I’ve come to the realization of is that in the age of AI editing code is going to matter a lot less. I’ve spent a lot of time mastering the Vim bindings and using different packages that help me edit faster or save a few key strokes. but with the workflow transitioning towards AI doing most of the edits and me doing more reviewing and orchestrating, those skills are not going to be needed.