[cml123]

Lately I've been seeing a lot of derision from the Emacs community of the consideration for integrating these kinds of tools with Emacs, but I truly think that's much more hurtful than helpful. Although the current development and usage of AI in software development may not closely resemble the techniques used at the time, it seems to me that Emacs' history is inextricably linked to the MIT AI Lab. It feels weird then that people today would shun the inclusion of AI integration into a tool that was produced from such a working group.

[uludag]

The beauty of Emacs though is that it puts the user in full control. There is nothing in the world stopping anyone from modifying anything in Emacs (at least on the Elisp layer), hence packages like this.

VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of vscode forks. Even if you had the most motivated, excited group of people wanting to work on the latest and greatest LLM interactions with VS code, they would most likely be forced to fork. On the other hand, it just takes one motivated Elisp dev to implement whatever they want and make any external package they want integrate with it.

Also, I think the derision from the Emacs community may be a bit overblown. I'm constantly seeing AI/LLM related plugins appearing for Emacs and they tend to get decent traction (e.g. https://github.com/karthink/gptel).

[1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

[paddy_m]

This is due to Richard Stalllman. He thinks that integrating "non-free" alternatives when free alternatives don't yet exist slows down free software development. Not just free as in freedom alternatives, not just free as in GPL licensed, but free as in FSF controlled projects. He did the same thing with linking extensions to GCC, LLVM debugger integration into emacs (fuzzy on that one), possibly treesitter into emacs, bzr vs git for emacs code source control, and a CI build farm for emacs. In each one of those cases, he eventually relented and the core project, eventually integrated the non-free alternative years later.

In the meantime this delaying didn't stop the non-free alternatives, but it did slow down adoption of the core project. This is attrocious project management that is driving people to non-free software. In the most egregious cases (bzr and CI build farm), it was done only because of his ego and wanting the FSF to matter.

[benreesman]

A lot of us are grateful in some abstract way for all the foundational work RMS did both technically and organizationally to preserve what remaining software freedoms we still have, but got off the bus a long time ago. He got really weird and it was on some "no fly zone" shit.

There's an `emacs` community that recognizes the history without being involved in any contemporary sense.

[skydhash]

Where would they integrate it. Emacs is a small core of C code. Almost everything is Elisp and in the same standing as third party packages. I’m not seeing what being in emacs core brings to an AI package?

[Guthur]

You clearly misunderstood the problem.

The entities he is so adamant against are not benign or passive, they actively try to capture your freedom for rent seeking behaviour.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc, have not got to where they are without this behaviour and they are so powerful that they have in many cases captured even public money from large governments for decades and are exceptionally sticky once allowed in.

LLM provide an exceptional opportunity for us to free ourselves from these captor interests, but we need to looking to develop them.

RMS has been proven correct on so many things from standard Microsoft behaviour, and planned obsolete to the licensing rug pulls of so called open source projects.

The question is not about stopping non free, that's a ridiculous objective, but if you don't have any principles you are going to have nothing solid to stand on in response to their nefarious and extractive behaviour.

[qiine]

this is just sad

[spauldo]

The Emacs community is incredibly diverse. You'll find derision for just about everything if you look for it.

I'm guessing there's a lot of grumbling on the mailing list about non-free AI services. That's fine, you can ignore that. 3rd party modules will provide, and there's nothing core can do about it.

[bowsamic]

I didn’t know MIT AI lab was involved in the modern AI boom, that’s interesting

[benreesman]

Asionometry has a great video on it: https://youtu.be/sV7C6Ezl35A

The Levy book Hackers has a ehole third of the book about it.