🔗 The Emacsification of Software

But AI agents have fracked Emacs culture, and it’s leaking out into the wider world. Given access to a screen and inputs, agents reliably build native user interfaces. Native UI was the province of professionally packaged programs. Now it’s all as bespoke as your editor configuration. And, while I’m sure there’s an upper limit to how good those interfaces can be (with current frontier models), that ceiling is higher than anything you can do in a TUI.

Source: The Emacsification of Software

The emacs-ification of apps is quite a memorable turn of phrase for the personal software golden age we are living in. If the outcome is that we have more native apps that are crafted or even drafted to cure a personal itch, that’s a totally fine outcome.

Still, every once in a while, one of these programs will escape containment. It’ll be useful enough for more than one person to install. But even then, the released artifact won’t be the most important thing about it. The source code won’t be either. If an agent wrote all the SwiftUI code in my project, what do you have to gain from closely reading it?

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

I’m probably only a little bit right about this, but I think a significant driver of new Emacs packages is a catalytic reaction between your messy local configuration and everyone else’s elisp code. Once you know how to get things done in elisp, it can be easier to build your own solution than to package-install an existing one. In that kind of environment, the code is of passing interest. What matters are the ideas, the observation that “yeah, you can do that, and it’ll work well”.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

This is a wonderful nuance. “Building” with LLMs is more akin to configuration than programming. The other comparison is that of a higher level language, with the highest level language being “spoken-language” in this case - English. And much like the higher level languages, unless you are a nerd who’s looking to optimize the heck out of the lower level language and is good or at least interested in it, you are going neither going to learn nor care about the lower level output.

I personally think configuration is a better term for it than programming. It’s okay if you disagree with it.

I don’t have a grand pronouncement to offer about the Future of Software. But I’m pretty sure nerd software is going to get a lot more interesting. How many clanky terminal apps can we drastically (and easily) improve? I’ll finally be able to understand iostat! Across a fleet of hosts, even. And bpftrace! Have you seen the shit Brendan Gregg had to put up with to do terminal visualizations from bpftrace? You don’t have to put up with any of this anymore. In fact, neither do I.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

So I’m glad to have something new to talk about that actually feels like an unalloyed good. Building native UI is now fun; a lot more fun than building web interfaces ever was. Give it a shot; make something stupidly specific to your own problems, enjoy it for a little while, and then share it somewhere — or, better yet, just a screenshot and the prompts you used to make it.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

This put the biggest smile on my face. I am ever more certain that we are in another era where a lifehacker like site might actually be useful and benefit us nerds. Heck, I should emacsify lifehacker.