4 ms·

This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning: >If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to

This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning: >If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP and a pretty good OS in Windows 7 respectively. No longer is that an option, your workflow will simply be interrupted by automatic updates. >Vim and Emacs, in their infinite customizability, can be molded to fit your exact hand and workflow Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. I trust vim not just because it can do a ton of shit (although that is certainly nice), but because unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change. Aside from switching from vim to neovim (my decision, not a forced update), my muscle memory from a couple decades ago still works today.

jcranmer 2mo ago
> Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP Prior to XP, MS had two lines of Windows: the Windows 9x kernels and the Windows NT kernels. Windows XP was meant to be the merger of the two lines, adapting Windows NT to have compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98 features. Unfortunately, Windows XP development went overlong, so MS wedged in Windows ME to give a stop-gap release until XP could actually be released.
jgord 2mo ago
A good tool does a job well with minimal side effects and maximal predictability. Perhaps this is why users dislike monthly SaaS - they cannot trust stability of the tool, because often the incentives are to keep adding features well past peak utility [ resulting in enshitification ]
- jgord 2mo ago
  followup .. one reason I now love and detest C++ is the regularity of new features in the core working set [ particularly the current politically correct incarnation of the smart pointer. ]
musicale 2mo ago
> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?
- eterm 2mo ago
  Indeed it makes no sense at all, because Windows 2000 even came out before Windows ME.
- ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
  Reactions to Windows ME forced MS to respond with XP; reactions to Vista forced them to respond with 7. They're being stated in parallel rather than chronologically.
  - accrual 2mo ago
    This isn't quite right, Windows Me was a stopgap between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Microsoft had no intention of keeping anyone on Me for long. There were already plans to get consumers onto an NT-based OS when Me launched, the initial version of this was codenamed Neptune. > Microsoft discussed a plan to delay Neptune in favor of an interim OS known as "Asteroid", which would have been an update to Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0), and have a consumer-oriented version. At the WinHEC conference on April 7, 1999, Steve Ballmer announced an updated version of Windows 98 known as Windows Millennium, breaking a promise made by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 1998 that Windows 98 would be the final consumer-oriented version of Windows to use the MS-DOS architecture. [0] So XP was not a reaction to Me's reception, it was already in the works as a replacement when Me came out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP
  - kelnos 2mo ago
    I feel like everyone is forgetting Windows 2000, which IMO is the best Windows that MS ever released. The main problem with it was hardware support, since people were hesitant to move away from the 95/98/ME line, and hardware manufacturers were still playing catch-up, as most didn't support NT 3/4 at the time and didn't see a need, as it was largely a server/business OS. But otherwise it was rock solid, fast, and a breath of fresh air. I did try XP here and there, but was instantly turned off by the cartoonish default theme (yes, I know you could change it). It was buggier than Win2k, and I didn't have the patience to wait around until they fixed it. I was told later on by people in the know that Service Pack 3 was the bees knees, but by then I'd moved on to Linux full-time (with some jaunts into OS X) and felt no need to come back.
connicpu 2mo ago
This is part of why my text editor is built from source on my own branch where I only occasionally pull in changes from master. I know I'm probably a very rare exception here.
peterbower 2mo ago
Vista came out after XP. They rushed 7 out after that.
ozim 2mo ago
That's not just developers as you noted. It is "velocity fallacy" — product people want "all the features ASAP or right away". Until users with their managers come with pitchforks and torches. I worked on such internal project where we as developers were able to deliver new features and new version every 2 weeks (which is not a pinnacle of the game of course) and were thinking if we can move to daily delivery. Because we were good devs and wanted to appease product owner. Until one day product owner came back with feedback, how everyone is pissed off at him for shifting ground under people feet, while he also thought he is doing great delivering all those great features. It was pushed back to limited amount of features each month. People need training, people need to understand what and why. In the end it turns out it is also AI coding fallacy, because most of the software is built for limited audience, which has its specific timeline on accepting and internalising new features or different ways of doing stuff. Unless we take humans from the equation and we start building for AI itself.
- songhonglei1985 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- hilariously 2mo ago
  This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software. I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?
  - saimiam 2mo ago
    Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi. So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?
    - kelnos 2mo ago
      I think the problem with the vi/vim example is that it's very much not for everyone. I use it, and have used it for 25-odd years, but I'm not an expert at it by any means (because I haven't taken the time to try to be), and occasionally have to look up how to do something. But I've customized it to my heart's content, and feel very productive in it. But I would not expect a large percentage of developers to want to do that. I've used IDEs as well, and they're mostly fine, and work really well for lots of people. Many IDEs are pretty damn customizeable too, though most people may not change many settings.
denkmoon 2mo ago
What's really freakin cool about AI development is other people can check rules into the repo which change the shape of my tools :)
- kelnos 2mo ago
  That sounds incredibly annoying to me. Not cool at all. (I would assume you're being sarcastic except for the smiley at the end of your comment.) The thing about it, though, is that LLMs aren't "your" tools. They're someone else's tools, and you are at the whims of day-to-day changes to them.
GuB-42 2mo ago
> Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. Except for one thing that pissed me off a great deal. I am not a true vim user, though I use it from time to time, because it is everywhere and it works through ssh. At some point they introduced "visual mode", and it turns on when you start using the mouse, it broke the way I used the mouse copy-paste in vim. I know I can do "set mouse-=a", but when I am just using vim as "the standard text editor" (sorry ed), I don't want to configure anything as it is usually a one shot job. I never asked for that, at some time, it just happened. I guess as a major upgrade, but the thing is, something changed that I didn't want to change. I understand the reason for this change, also https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ but I just wanted to say that even vim is not immune. Some tools are immune though. Usually command line tools used in scripts. For example "apt-get" doesn't change, but "apt" does. "apt-get" is what you use when you want a stable interface (especially scripts), "apt" is for when you want something nicer.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  On your laptop, in ~/.ssh/config: Host * PermitLocalCommand yes LocalCommand rsync -azL --checksum -e "ssh -p %p -o PermitLocalCommand=no" "$HOME/.vimrc" "%r@%h:.vimrc" This copies your ~/.vimrc if unmodified to every server you ssh to. (For bonus points, you can make a program to copy ~/.ssh/config around as well so that your config gets copied to servers you ssh to from there.)
- Izkata 2mo ago
  I think visual mode has existed as long as vim existed, and vi was what didn't have it. When I first started at my company, we did all work on shared VMs, and the system vimrc had that "mouse" setting enabled. Something an employee had done decades ago to be helpful, really confused me until I realized what was going on. I'm thinking your distro, not vim, is what flipped the setting.
cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. As I recall, one of the earliest widespread users automatic updates was Google with Chrome, which they did because otherwise there was no way to respond to severe 0days and such before huge swathes of users got hit. So I think there's a place for automatic updates, but the feature should be restricted to security fixes only. Using it to foist ill-conceived changes on users is just abuse.
- BrenBarn 2mo ago
  > A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software.
  - cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
    I won't argue with that, but with how complex web browsers have become, holes are unavoidable regardless of the level of effort put forth to prevent them.
  - wolrah 2mo ago
    > I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software. Pawn Stars meme: "Best I can do is people using glorified chatbots to generate mediocre code an order of magnitude faster" That said, the vast majority of the exploits that led to the widespread adoption of automatic update mechanisms were based around memory safety bugs which we do in fact have solutions to entirely prevent in most newly developed software these days.
- RossBencina 2mo ago
  Agree. Security fixes are the killer app for automatic updates. I would argue there are other kinds of fixes that should make the cut: crash bugs, data loss bugs. Maybe even broken features, interaction annoyances, etc. Then it becomes a slippery slope, and the risk/benefit trade-offs are harder to arbitrate. I don't think "ill-conceived" is giving enough credit. It has been clear to me for a long time that "security" is the justification for pushing the user to update, but the updates themselves are frequently leveraged as a vector for other, less user-friendly, practices.
thayne 2mo ago
> its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change Vim and emacs aren't unique in this. In fact quite a few non-commercial FOSS projects don't make significant changes to the UI. I think there are (at least) a couple of reasons for that. First, there isn't usually pressure to constantly attract new users, so there isn't as much pressure to change the UI to make it easier or simpler for new users, or follow UI trends. Secondly, the projects often don't have dedicated UI/UX designers who want to try out new ideas or make their mark, etc. However, these aren't strictly good things, you can end up with an unintuitive UI with a steep learning curve that is hard to learn.
devin 2mo ago
Your view of what constitutes a tool is overly broad. An OS is not a tool. A hand plane is a tool. It’s sharp and does one thing. The stuff an OS does might enable tools, and it may contain many tools, but it is not itself a tool.
- brianpan 2mo ago
  A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. A computer is also a tool that does many things and the OS is arguably the important part of how a user wields that tool.
  - lelanthran 2mo ago
    > A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. It does variations of the same thing. A computer is more of a toolbox than a tool.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Isn't a food processor just what certain marketing teams call a blender?
    - tremon 2mo ago
      Blending is just one of the functions of a food processor. A food processor can usually also do kneading, mincing, and slicing, or (depending on extensions) even rolling (pasta) dough and squeezing citrus fruits.
devmor 2mo ago
> This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. This is a huge complaint for me. I had to disable JetBrains from automatic updates because they wont stop trying to force their horrendous new UI on me, and the "Classic UI" plugin I have to use to keep my IDE working the way I have been used to for the past 15 years is never updated at the same time.
Razengan 2mo ago
> If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. On the other hand, if you hire a cook, then all you need to know is English (or whatever language they speak). Even if the cooks keep changing, you can always just tell them "use the knife"
pmontra 2mo ago
As a data point: I'm using Claude Pro inside Emacs right now. I can copy/paste better than when I use it inside the terminal. I never installed a custom IDE since maybe 2012 (my last Java project) so I can't really compare the experiences but I don't have anything to complain to the agentic pairing of Claude and Emacs.
tremon 2mo ago
> unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change My entire reason for switching from vim to neovim was that vim did change its UI, by neutering /etc/vimrc in a major update a while ago.
xnx 2mo ago
Windows Vista was disliked at launch primarily it ran slowly on existing hardware, suffered from widespread driver incompatibilities, and introduced constant security pop-ups. UI changes were pretty minor, especially compared to the flat design of windows 8.

jcranmer 2mo ago

> Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP Prior to XP, MS had two lines of Windows: the Windows 9x kernels and the Windows NT kernels. Windows XP was meant to be the merger of the two lines, adapting Windows NT to have compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98 features. Unfortunately, Windows XP development went overlong, so MS wedged in Windows ME to give a stop-gap release until XP could actually be released.

jgord 2mo ago

A good tool does a job well with minimal side effects and maximal predictability. Perhaps this is why users dislike monthly SaaS - they cannot trust stability of the tool, because often the incentives are to keep adding features well past peak utility [ resulting in enshitification ]

jgord 2mo ago
followup .. one reason I now love and detest C++ is the regularity of new features in the core working set [ particularly the current politically correct incarnation of the smart pointer. ]

musicale 2mo ago

> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?

eterm 2mo ago
Indeed it makes no sense at all, because Windows 2000 even came out before Windows ME.
ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
Reactions to Windows ME forced MS to respond with XP; reactions to Vista forced them to respond with 7. They're being stated in parallel rather than chronologically.
- accrual 2mo ago
  This isn't quite right, Windows Me was a stopgap between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Microsoft had no intention of keeping anyone on Me for long. There were already plans to get consumers onto an NT-based OS when Me launched, the initial version of this was codenamed Neptune. > Microsoft discussed a plan to delay Neptune in favor of an interim OS known as "Asteroid", which would have been an update to Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0), and have a consumer-oriented version. At the WinHEC conference on April 7, 1999, Steve Ballmer announced an updated version of Windows 98 known as Windows Millennium, breaking a promise made by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 1998 that Windows 98 would be the final consumer-oriented version of Windows to use the MS-DOS architecture. [0] So XP was not a reaction to Me's reception, it was already in the works as a replacement when Me came out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP
- kelnos 2mo ago
  I feel like everyone is forgetting Windows 2000, which IMO is the best Windows that MS ever released. The main problem with it was hardware support, since people were hesitant to move away from the 95/98/ME line, and hardware manufacturers were still playing catch-up, as most didn't support NT 3/4 at the time and didn't see a need, as it was largely a server/business OS. But otherwise it was rock solid, fast, and a breath of fresh air. I did try XP here and there, but was instantly turned off by the cartoonish default theme (yes, I know you could change it). It was buggier than Win2k, and I didn't have the patience to wait around until they fixed it. I was told later on by people in the know that Service Pack 3 was the bees knees, but by then I'd moved on to Linux full-time (with some jaunts into OS X) and felt no need to come back.

connicpu 2mo ago

This is part of why my text editor is built from source on my own branch where I only occasionally pull in changes from master. I know I'm probably a very rare exception here.

peterbower 2mo ago

Vista came out after XP. They rushed 7 out after that.

ozim 2mo ago

That's not just developers as you noted. It is "velocity fallacy" — product people want "all the features ASAP or right away". Until users with their managers come with pitchforks and torches. I worked on such internal project where we as developers were able to deliver new features and new version every 2 weeks (which is not a pinnacle of the game of course) and were thinking if we can move to daily delivery. Because we were good devs and wanted to appease product owner. Until one day product owner came back with feedback, how everyone is pissed off at him for shifting ground under people feet, while he also thought he is doing great delivering all those great features. It was pushed back to limited amount of features each month. People need training, people need to understand what and why. In the end it turns out it is also AI coding fallacy, because most of the software is built for limited audience, which has its specific timeline on accepting and internalising new features or different ways of doing stuff. Unless we take humans from the equation and we start building for AI itself.

songhonglei1985 2mo ago
[flagged]
hilariously 2mo ago
This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software. I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?
- saimiam 2mo ago
  Just up thread from your comment, someone commented in a positive way on the infinite customisability of vi. So which is preferable - customisability or very limited feature set?
  - kelnos 2mo ago
    I think the problem with the vi/vim example is that it's very much not for everyone. I use it, and have used it for 25-odd years, but I'm not an expert at it by any means (because I haven't taken the time to try to be), and occasionally have to look up how to do something. But I've customized it to my heart's content, and feel very productive in it. But I would not expect a large percentage of developers to want to do that. I've used IDEs as well, and they're mostly fine, and work really well for lots of people. Many IDEs are pretty damn customizeable too, though most people may not change many settings.

denkmoon 2mo ago

What's really freakin cool about AI development is other people can check rules into the repo which change the shape of my tools :)

kelnos 2mo ago
That sounds incredibly annoying to me. Not cool at all. (I would assume you're being sarcastic except for the smiley at the end of your comment.) The thing about it, though, is that LLMs aren't "your" tools. They're someone else's tools, and you are at the whims of day-to-day changes to them.

GuB-42 2mo ago

> Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. Except for one thing that pissed me off a great deal. I am not a true vim user, though I use it from time to time, because it is everywhere and it works through ssh. At some point they introduced "visual mode", and it turns on when you start using the mouse, it broke the way I used the mouse copy-paste in vim. I know I can do "set mouse-=a", but when I am just using vim as "the standard text editor" (sorry ed), I don't want to configure anything as it is usually a one shot job. I never asked for that, at some time, it just happened. I guess as a major upgrade, but the thing is, something changed that I didn't want to change. I understand the reason for this change, also https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ but I just wanted to say that even vim is not immune. Some tools are immune though. Usually command line tools used in scripts. For example "apt-get" doesn't change, but "apt" does. "apt-get" is what you use when you want a stable interface (especially scripts), "apt" is for when you want something nicer.

fragmede 2mo ago
On your laptop, in ~/.ssh/config: Host * PermitLocalCommand yes LocalCommand rsync -azL --checksum -e "ssh -p %p -o PermitLocalCommand=no" "$HOME/.vimrc" "%r@%h:.vimrc" This copies your ~/.vimrc if unmodified to every server you ssh to. (For bonus points, you can make a program to copy ~/.ssh/config around as well so that your config gets copied to servers you ssh to from there.)
Izkata 2mo ago
I think visual mode has existed as long as vim existed, and vi was what didn't have it. When I first started at my company, we did all work on shared VMs, and the system vimrc had that "mouse" setting enabled. Something an employee had done decades ago to be helpful, really confused me until I realized what was going on. I'm thinking your distro, not vim, is what flipped the setting.

cosmic_cheese 2mo ago

A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. As I recall, one of the earliest widespread users automatic updates was Google with Chrome, which they did because otherwise there was no way to respond to severe 0days and such before huge swathes of users got hit. So I think there's a place for automatic updates, but the feature should be restricted to security fixes only. Using it to foist ill-conceived changes on users is just abuse.

BrenBarn 2mo ago
> A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
  I won't argue with that, but with how complex web browsers have become, holes are unavoidable regardless of the level of effort put forth to prevent them.
- wolrah 2mo ago
  > I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software. Pawn Stars meme: "Best I can do is people using glorified chatbots to generate mediocre code an order of magnitude faster" That said, the vast majority of the exploits that led to the widespread adoption of automatic update mechanisms were based around memory safety bugs which we do in fact have solutions to entirely prevent in most newly developed software these days.
RossBencina 2mo ago
Agree. Security fixes are the killer app for automatic updates. I would argue there are other kinds of fixes that should make the cut: crash bugs, data loss bugs. Maybe even broken features, interaction annoyances, etc. Then it becomes a slippery slope, and the risk/benefit trade-offs are harder to arbitrate. I don't think "ill-conceived" is giving enough credit. It has been clear to me for a long time that "security" is the justification for pushing the user to update, but the updates themselves are frequently leveraged as a vector for other, less user-friendly, practices.

thayne 2mo ago

> its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change Vim and emacs aren't unique in this. In fact quite a few non-commercial FOSS projects don't make significant changes to the UI. I think there are (at least) a couple of reasons for that. First, there isn't usually pressure to constantly attract new users, so there isn't as much pressure to change the UI to make it easier or simpler for new users, or follow UI trends. Secondly, the projects often don't have dedicated UI/UX designers who want to try out new ideas or make their mark, etc. However, these aren't strictly good things, you can end up with an unintuitive UI with a steep learning curve that is hard to learn.

devin 2mo ago

Your view of what constitutes a tool is overly broad. An OS is not a tool. A hand plane is a tool. It’s sharp and does one thing. The stuff an OS does might enable tools, and it may contain many tools, but it is not itself a tool.

brianpan 2mo ago
A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. A computer is also a tool that does many things and the OS is arguably the important part of how a user wields that tool.
- lelanthran 2mo ago
  > A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. It does variations of the same thing. A computer is more of a toolbox than a tool.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Isn't a food processor just what certain marketing teams call a blender?
  - tremon 2mo ago
    Blending is just one of the functions of a food processor. A food processor can usually also do kneading, mincing, and slicing, or (depending on extensions) even rolling (pasta) dough and squeezing citrus fruits.

devmor 2mo ago

> This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. This is a huge complaint for me. I had to disable JetBrains from automatic updates because they wont stop trying to force their horrendous new UI on me, and the "Classic UI" plugin I have to use to keep my IDE working the way I have been used to for the past 15 years is never updated at the same time.

Razengan 2mo ago

> If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. On the other hand, if you hire a cook, then all you need to know is English (or whatever language they speak). Even if the cooks keep changing, you can always just tell them "use the knife"

pmontra 2mo ago

As a data point: I'm using Claude Pro inside Emacs right now. I can copy/paste better than when I use it inside the terminal. I never installed a custom IDE since maybe 2012 (my last Java project) so I can't really compare the experiences but I don't have anything to complain to the agentic pairing of Claude and Emacs.

tremon 2mo ago

> unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change My entire reason for switching from vim to neovim was that vim did change its UI, by neutering /etc/vimrc in a major update a while ago.

xnx 2mo ago

Windows Vista was disliked at launch primarily it ran slowly on existing hardware, suffered from widespread driver incompatibilities, and introduced constant security pop-ups. UI changes were pretty minor, especially compared to the flat design of windows 8.