this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Why do you say it's an amazing project? Looks to me like someone copied vim, and according to the commits did nothing useful other than changing some text in a few files. The author's comments are all about coming up with a cool name for it, and what "cool" new features to add. I don't see any plan on actually making this a viable competing project. I don't see the author having much credentials in leading a project of this caliber either.
Before anyone misunderstands my comment, yes anyone not liking AI should stop using vim, I very much agree. And there are two viable ways forward:
This project is not one of them.
Where is the author's plan to tackle the 1600 issues that vim has open? How do they address the fact that vim has hundreds of commits each month, and literally had 68 contributors in just the last month? In the past month they closed 66 issues with vim. Half of vim's codebase is written in vimscript, and the other half in C. The new lead maintainer, I quote: "thankfully i know some C, but not vimscript". They know some C and no vimscript? So how do they plan to develop this project?!
Another quote: "removing old targets, stripping away graphical stuff (who uses this in graphical mode anyways? everyone uses it in the CLI...", and they already plan to drop Windows support. Already ignoring user's needs and removing functionality. Now, they are perfectly entitled to do whatever in their fork. But how is it a viable competitor to vim in any way?
Even assuming the worst case scenario on what damage AI can do to the progress of vim's development, who can seriously suggest that 1 person who doesn't even know the relevant programming langagues can make a better project than hundreds of experienced contributors that are doing it for years, AI or not?
And again, all the power to them, they can have some fun with their fork. But it's ridicoulus to suggest it as an alternative. Two years from now, vim will have fixed ~1500 issues at the current rate. And will have a bunch of new ones due to AI. Meanwhile this project will be dead, and the latest version will have 1500 unfixed issues that are all fixed in vim.
Taking a stance again AI in vim? Do it, campaign for it, talk to the maintainers, effect change, review PRs and comment about the AI mistakes you see, submit bug reports for bugs caused by AI and make a case for forbidding it's use. You have my full support. This fork? It's obviously going nowhere, it's a waste of effort that could be used to actually stop AI.
Where do you think all the contributors to vim came from? Do you think they just appeared day one? This fork just started. Of course there are no other contributors. Every project is a failure if they need to have multiple people working on it the day it's conceived.
I'd say that every project needs at least one capable person working on it at conception. This one appears to have zero at the moment.
So do you know everyone working on it? To assume noone is capable? Because otherwise this is just offensive. Also the project has been created less than 24 hours ago, so what do u expect already a ton of differences ?
The premise of the comment I responded to was that there are no other contributors besides the the person who forked it, and very same person said that they don't know vimscript.
Forking open source code is never a waste of effort. That's literally the reason why open/libre source exists, to have work all done in the open and if some people fundamentally disagree with the work being done, they can start a new workstream.
Of course they can, and I underline that in my comment several times, that this person is free to do it, good for them. I don't disagree with that at all. I'm sure they will learn a lot and that's great.
And everyone else is free to evaluate the prospects and realities of that fork.
Yeah. You may as well just download a release tagged before he AI stuff is added.
Yeah recently had this happen in the. Net world for some projects: They went from free to commercial or some other reason, and then people quickly forked the last version before that. All with that idea that they're the defenders of what was good about it.
But let's face it, if you had anywhere near the interest and commitment to that subject matter, you'd already be maintaining a competing project, or be helping at the original one.
I think people are enticed by the glory of having a repo with many stars, but have no realistic idea how much of their time this would eat up if they were serious about it.