4 ms·

This is one of those times when I want someone to explain the value to me. Like is this to help coding agents be more efficient? Forgive my ignorance!

by thornton 11mo ago

utopiah 11mo ago
I guess it's to win at Vim Golf, i.e. how does one get more efficient.
qsort 11mo ago
I believe that's mostly for fun. Coding agents wouldn't need to interact via the same interfaces humans use, they'd be given a tool to read and write files and they'd be fine with that.
- fnfs2000 11mo ago
  They're literally using diff/patch under the covers, at least the setup i'm currently using.
  - andai 11mo ago
    Did you get them working with diff syntax? I couldn't figure it out, so I just tried a bunch of agentic programs, found a few that actually worked, and it turned out they all use search/replace strings. There's probably other ways to do it but it seems basically everyone settled on that. I've been trying that with smaller models and had to make some adjustments (e.g. they all really wanted to include the filename twice). So I just make a small tweak and bam suddenly I can edit code with small fast cheap models.
- zero_bias 11mo ago
  Unfortunately, this characterizes the entire project: "cool" examples with no practical utility. Meanwhile, the language itself is incredibly strange (functions via patterns are an example of strange language choice), extremely slow, and very unstable. In short, it's developing in the wrong direction. I switched from Mathematica to Matlab in my work; it was the best investment of time in the entire project
  - lieuwex 11mo ago
    This function is user contributed. It's not official.
tantalor 11mo ago
The thought of forcing the AI to use vim gave me a nice chuckle. Thank you sir.
- d-lisp 11mo ago
  I found chatGPT to be bad at VimGolfing. ``` Here is a 35 keystrokes solution that beat your 36 keystrokes solution ! <89 keystrokes> ``` And then it keeps looping in the same way if you ask it about the seahorse emoji (or sometimes just lie about the keystrokes number). In fact that's not surprising, what is rather surprising is that some of the solutions actually work (>= 100 keystrokes)
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    They should probably train LLMs to be bad at vim golf. The whole point of vim’s funky language is that human keypresses are very valuable and should not be wasted. Saving keystrokes for an LLM is a non-goal at best.

This is one of those times when I want someone to explain the value to me. Like is this to help coding agents be more efficient? Forgive my ignorance!

utopiah 11mo ago

I guess it's to win at Vim Golf, i.e. how does one get more efficient.

qsort 11mo ago

I believe that's mostly for fun. Coding agents wouldn't need to interact via the same interfaces humans use, they'd be given a tool to read and write files and they'd be fine with that.

fnfs2000 11mo ago
They're literally using diff/patch under the covers, at least the setup i'm currently using.
- andai 11mo ago
  Did you get them working with diff syntax? I couldn't figure it out, so I just tried a bunch of agentic programs, found a few that actually worked, and it turned out they all use search/replace strings. There's probably other ways to do it but it seems basically everyone settled on that. I've been trying that with smaller models and had to make some adjustments (e.g. they all really wanted to include the filename twice). So I just make a small tweak and bam suddenly I can edit code with small fast cheap models.
zero_bias 11mo ago
Unfortunately, this characterizes the entire project: "cool" examples with no practical utility. Meanwhile, the language itself is incredibly strange (functions via patterns are an example of strange language choice), extremely slow, and very unstable. In short, it's developing in the wrong direction. I switched from Mathematica to Matlab in my work; it was the best investment of time in the entire project
- lieuwex 11mo ago
  This function is user contributed. It's not official.

tantalor 11mo ago

The thought of forcing the AI to use vim gave me a nice chuckle. Thank you sir.

d-lisp 11mo ago
I found chatGPT to be bad at VimGolfing. ``` Here is a 35 keystrokes solution that beat your 36 keystrokes solution ! <89 keystrokes> ``` And then it keeps looping in the same way if you ask it about the seahorse emoji (or sometimes just lie about the keystrokes number). In fact that's not surprising, what is rather surprising is that some of the solutions actually work (>= 100 keystrokes)
- bee_rider 11mo ago
  They should probably train LLMs to be bad at vim golf. The whole point of vim’s funky language is that human keypresses are very valuable and should not be wasted. Saving keystrokes for an LLM is a non-goal at best.