I’ve been using Neovim (and before that, Vim) for 20 years, and as such spend most of my day in the terminal. I like it there. As dumb as it sounds, it makes me happy.
That doesn’t mean I’ve mastered Neovim though, much less the other tools that make the terminal so powerful. The esoteric superpowers of sed and awk still elude me. The dream of effortlessly piping text through a series of small, precision tools, to achieve exactly the output I desire is still just a dream.
If anything, I feel as though my knowledge narrowed over the last decade or so, as I fell into familiar patterns of use which work well enough.
A few months ago, I decided it was time to learn my tools properly. To focus on the fundamentals that do not change.
Today, that seems almost embarrassingly naive.
It’s not that I’ve been completely oblivious to the rise of AI coding agents. I’ve used them, on and off, for at least the past couple of years, particularly for throwaway code that I have no intention of reusing (much less maintaining). For real work, though, they pretty much sucked.
In mid-2025, after several joyless (and expensive) weeks giving Claude Code a decent shot, I decided enough was enough. The much-vaunted productivity gains were nowhere to be found, and in their stead was the misery of wrangling a hyperactive toddler who cannot be left alone for even the briefest of moments, lest they trash the entire house.
Hence my decision to double down on the nerd tools, and step away from the AI hype. On reflection, this may have been pure psychological self-preservation.
I was recently drawn back in, and being completely honest, I’m freaking out ever so slightly.
It’s not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times). By the time I pulled the plug, it had ruined all of the correct files without doing anything to fix the original problem.
For the most part, though, they seem to have become good enough. Good enough that choosing to focus on the fundamentals seems rather foolish.
Sure, Claude still occasionally faceplants on a regex, but most of the time it sticks the landing. At this point, learning Awk seems about as sane as mastering the loom. Do it as a hobby, by all means, but don’t delude yourself that it’s a useful skill.
Like I said, I may be freaking out ever so slightly.
Thankfully, there are some people out there who are better at articulating their feelings than I am. Dave Kiss, in particular, has some interesting thoughts on where we are, where we’re going, and what we’ve lost.
You can be grateful for the efficiency and still mourn what it cost. You can use the tools every day and still feel the weight of what they’ve changed about your craft, your career, your sense of what it means to be good at this.The code was never the point, maybe. But for a lot of us, it felt like it was. And that feeling doesn’t just disappear because the tools got better.
Dave Kiss, Stop calling it vibe coding
He’s not wrong, but it does make me wonder: even if the code was not the point, what do you do if it was the thing that brought you joy?