Hacker News

points by Hammershaft 1 day ago | 0 comments

You may be the most productive emacs user.

emacs is a rabbithole and the cost is rarely worth it. LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

[–] gspr 1 day ago

> LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

I'd rather leave it unconfigured than have a massive configuration I don't understand.

[–] jimbokun 1 day ago

You can always read the generated code and spruce it up or have the LLM refactor it to your liking.

[–] gspr 1 day ago

Reading code in a language you do not understand is not a way to understand.

[–] iLemming 23 hours ago

You're the one complained:

> My Emacs config file is a hodge-podge of little snippets I don't properly understand

People giving you truly time-saving advice. Use a good model to unhodge-podge it. You can even ask it to explain every single Lisp snippet it makes, to the detail and granularity level you prefer - want a big picture, please; would you like nitty-gritty details - ask no more. It's not like it's gonna build a "massive configuration" and absolutely will refuse to make it make sense to you.

[–] gspr 23 hours ago

Yes. "A hodge-podge of little snippets I don't understand" is the situation I'm in and wish to avoid. "An LLM wrote a lot more that I don't understand" will make the situation a lot worse.

There's indeed lots of good advice in this thread. I appreciate it all! "Just use an LLM for the stuff you don't understand" is, however, not one of them.

[–] iLemming 22 hours ago

You're hypothesizing of something you haven't even tried. What's the worst possible outcome? You end up with more shit you don't understand. You then just throw it away and go back to smaller amount of shit you didn't understand well to begin with.

[–] gspr 18 hours ago

"Come on just try it" is a quite weak argument.