I explored how I can use AI when writing software beyond code completion, and I didn't like any of the UX I saw (maybe except Cursor).

Well, I do all my work in vim. Claude knows how to use vim! And... you can do anything(!) from vim.

Turns out, embedding Claude in vim means you get a fully agentic AI pair programmer in <1000 LoC. (See the GitHub README for examples of what "fully agentic" means.) And if you have some semantic vim tools (jedi.vim, eclim, ...) set up, Claude could use them if instructed.

Unlike CLIs, you can review Claude's changes, and keep the chat history. So an editor interface is the killer feature for real work.

Sonnet 3.5 won't take your programmer job yet. But it can make you a lot faster, even if you type very fast (especially its one-shot ability is amazing). The trick is not to give up thinking and stay in charge. Just let it do the grunt work.

P.S. I literally never wrote anything in vimscript before claude.vim. Thankfully, Claude did 95% of the code grunt work for me, most of the time already self-hosted.

P.P.S. Claude is on AWS Bedrock, chances are you can use it even in environments where sending code to random 3rd-party SaaS is a no-no.