AI, Vim, and the Illusion of Flow(rosipov.com) |
AI, Vim, and the Illusion of Flow(rosipov.com) |
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.
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.
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.
You mean, except for the spurious :w here and there...