Agreed on the config. I just launch a Claude code in my vimrc directory now if I want to change anything about my setup or have any questions about how to do something.
Also, I love running a tmux pane for vim, and then like 4 or 5 more -- a few Claude code instances, one for the dev environment, one for interacting with jj/git or other random commands. So easy to switch between tasks. My main annoyance with my setup is that my Bluetooth trackball times out after a period of inactivity, and when I eventually need to use the pointer again there's a lag while it reconnects...
May be splitting hairs, but I don't think it's the terminal-native part that's relevant, so much as that both LLMs and emacs/vim are text oriented in ways which e.g. VSCode isn't. (Or perhaps just the text-oriented nature is a result from initial constraint from being terminal-native).
As the author points out, that Emacs is a highly extensible 'operating system' which makes it relatively easy to bring different tasks together. -- This ought to be a natural parallel to what the agentic tools are trying to do (use MCPs and skills etc. to bring different functionality to the LLM execution environment).
That LLMs can help users extend emacs ought to lower the difficulty curve.
Still. It's silly to wish that Emacs could be the LLM's best friend, rather than demonstrating how it is.
RE: "what if in the future all coding skills are irrelevant". My experience has been that good results from LLMs come from putting good thought into its usage. They're quite far from a magic "push the button and get the result you want" where the skill doesn't matter.
Not totally related to your point BUT I’d like to tack on that lisps and generally repl-friendly languages are in an interesting spot in the LLM-enabled world.
The calva-backseat-driver vscode extension runs an MCP that lets LLMs manipulate and eval clojure expressions in a REPL. It provides a tighter feedback loop and lets LLMs do much more complicated stuff with much more confidence. They can test functions as they go, read docs, check query outputs, write and eval tests. It’s actually crazy what Claude opus can do with REPL access.
It might be insanity to let an LLM modify your emacs on the fly, but I’m sure people will have some crazy and interesting ideas in that vein!
With the idea of the recent HN article that files are the common media of communication between humans and LLM's, it's still useful to have direct file-skills; to be able to read raw files the LLM outputs, or give it input through files, and able to manipulate the files efficiently. You can use an LLM to prompt to search through the files and all that, but for such basic things it's worth learning it yourself, if you do it often.
learning and using and customizing emacs has never been better
getting a bibliography and citation workflow up and running in org is incredibly easy. Use a model to read the first page of your PDFs dir and add bibtex entries...
then you just build your static site around that
please don't write with a model. We want your own prose