AI, Vim, and the Illusion of Flow
rosipov.comI agree with most of the points on the article although it doesn't really have much to do with vim (which the author acknowledges).
I too have often compared AI usage to vim in the past months: AI enthusiasts seem to spend most of their time tweaking their setup; creating custom agents, skills, mcp servers, writing custom tools for their agent to use, customizing their harnesses, loops and whatnot. Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config. It makes you feel productive while you really aren't and while in the end it might help you better stay within the flow the author talks about it the article the gains are typically very minimal if one is honest with oneself.
Man I just stick with the defaults on vim. I want to be able to install vim on any server I'm SSH'd into and have it all work the same way.
I do use Neovim as an IDE but thats a bit different, as lazynvim does 90% of what I need and the rest is just tiny changes that improves the experience for me. I also use AI to change my lua files simply because its faster and I'd rather focus on programming.
Another anecdote: I am a big nvim user and set everything up three years ago and basically haven't touched it since. At this point I'm a bit afraid I won't be able to fix it if something breaks lol.
I do think the culture of tweaking constantly without ever doing real work exists, but it's far less common than it seems online. People who make posts about their neovim configs all the time are certainly more likely to be in this camp than people not posting at all.
I was super into vim in college (20 years ago now, jeez). I started off like that but then transitioned to basically using “default vim” (plus support for a few external tools like ctags or cscope). For basically this reason!
> Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config.
What (or why) are those frequent config changes?
I use neovim and I can say I've migrated[1] to vim packages (from Pathogen) years ago, and I also git-clone a repo once every few years if I want LSP support for a language I haven't used before.
But I wouldn't call this "keep updating/rewriting".
[1]: By removing a line from my config, and then running `mv` once.
It really seemed more in vogue in 2011ish, Command-T and nerdtree era
vim tweakers are a small minority of users surely. I might fiddle with my config once per year.
> nobody can tell from reading my code whether I wrote it in Vim
You mean, except for the spurious :w here and there...