A Eulogy for Vim

A tearful goodbye turned into a comment-section cage match. A longtime fan of Vim—a beloved, minimal text tool used by coders—wrote a eulogy and then forked it into “Vim Classic,” an older, pre-new-features version meant to avoid code touched by generative AI (think AI text generators, also called large language models). He frames it like mourning a friend and honoring Vim’s late creator, while blasting AI for environmental and social harms.

That’s when the crowd split like a log file. One camp saluted the stand as principled: “Drew stays true even under pressure,” cheered one, while another vowed to try the fork because they “don’t want any form of AI in Vim.” But the vibe-coders came out swinging—one fan joked that coding a Battleship game for fun is culture, not corruption. Meanwhile, pragmatists rolled their eyes: if you try to avoid any code that ever brushed past an AI, “might as well give up on everything,” said one.

Then the accountants arrived: Show the math. Skeptics challenged the sweeping doom about energy, water, and politics, asking for a real cost–benefit analysis. And of course, nostalgia memes flooded in: “Elvis has re‑entered the building” (a nod to the old-school Elvis editor). The eulogy may have started in grief—but the comments turned it into a full-on culture war about how we build our tools, and who gets to say what’s “pure.”