[oneeyedpigeon]

I went to check out neovim and noticed it's currently sponsored by two AI products! Of course, that's one level removed from actually integrating AI in your product but, still—it's getting harder and harder to avoid altogether.

[mort96]

Oh wow, I hadn't noticed that.

I guess it's always possible to return to Vim if Neovim starts showing signs of being steered by its sponsors.

[dbalatero]

My guess is that neovim wouldn't do a core integration of ai that ships with the editor. At most, maybe if there are ui interface gaps that would help make a better experience, they might expose more apis there that could be useful outside ai as well.

Plugins are relatively easy to write in nvim so I'd expect all ai stuff to come from there and be opt in.

[CuriouslyC]

At this rate you're going to be cooking over a campfire and living in a cave in a few years.

[mort96]

Nah, the AI bubble will have popped in a few years and projects will stop sprouting AI features left and right.

[CuriouslyC]

Did the dot com crash cause software to stop integrating internet features?

[tialaramex]

The Network was a good idea fifty years ago, and it was still a good idea by the time the Internet was definitely the next network which was a few years before the DotCom bubble, both actual large language models and the "What if all human conversations in a box?" thought experiment (this definitely passes the Turing test, but, it's clearly not a person is it) are also good ideas, distinct from present "AI in everything" LLM craziness.

Just because tulips are nice doesn't make Tulip Madness a good idea. At the height of the DotCom boom consumers were buying stock at IPO prices for companies which made no sense whatsoever, because they said "Internet" or, (hence the naming) ".com"

For example Be Inc. was a vehicle for a failed Apple exec to "prove" he was the right person to run Apple, not Steve Jobs. After their runway ran out and institutions wanted nothing further to do with it, Be Inc. went IPO. They do this by saying they were an "Internet appliance" company and taking an OS with terrible networking but pretending it's good. In normal times this would attract laughter - they're offering a worse product, most likely it just tanks or never comes to market, and in the extreme case that Apple wants the CEO they're going to cut a deal with the man, not save the dead weight company. His most senior people might get parachutes but Apple has no reason to pay ordinary stock owners a penny. Sure enough those who bought at IPO rescued the institutions but were wiped out.

[mort96]

No, we still have software with Internet features. But Internet features went from a solution looking for a problem, to just another tool we can reach for when it's actually useful.

A whole lot of "AI" features today are in that "solution looking for a problem" category. There's a lot of "AI" in places where it really makes no sense at all. Companies and projects are afraid of missing out on what they think could be the Next Big Thing, instead of just trying to make the best software they can.

When the AI bubble bursts, it could end up like Internet features: software gets them when it genuinely makes sense, but they won't be crammed into software which has no need for it. Or it could end up like cryptocurrency: it pretty much just disappears as people realize that they don't really have any use other than to speculate on its value and to buy drugs.

Personally, my bet is that they'll end up more like cryptocurrencies. After all, "AI" doesn't just have to be a useful feature to be worth it. It has a real cost. Companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google, as well as the venture capitalists and investment funds behind the likes of Anthropic, are currently sinking VAST amounts of capital into giving "AI" away for free or heavily subsidized. At some point, it'll need to become profitable, and I don't think many people will find that the value outweighs the real, non-subsidized costs.

But we'll see.

[norir]

Thankfully for me, I guess, neovim broke my config about a year ago by changing the default color scheme in a way that I could not fix easily with confug. So I forked and built my own and will likely never update it.