there were plugins where I could quickly describe the edits I wanted, and it would utilize my existing bindings and shortcuts to do stuff that was very common for me. It was more of a fun trick than useful, I guess, but it saved keystrokes, and I have severe tendonitis, so it was nice.
Nowadays almost never enter vim, because it is 100x faster than I could ever be. I use it for viewing files occasionally but reviewing edits in the claude or codex window usually works just as well. It’s the first skill I expect to decay for me (vim)
I've been doing this more and more over the past year, but I just write on plain white paper and throw it away after the stack on my desk gets too big.
Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective.
Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.
I work in Python as well and find Claude quite poor at writing proper tests, might be using it wrong. Just last week, I asked Opus to create a small integration test (with pre-existing examples) and it tried to create a 200-line file with 20 tests I didn't ask for.
I am not sure why, but it kept trying to do that, although I made several attempts.
Ended up writing it on my own, very odd. This was in Cursor, however.
I think there's an unfinished journey whenever I hear such a story. Like someone who learns just enough about music that they "feel like" Bach is better than Taylor Swift, but then never move to the other side to use their newly acquired competence to understand what's nice about Taylor Swift's music as well.
E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.
There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.
Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.
Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.
> The "hey if you squint this thing it looks like religion for the non-religious" perspective is just one I've heard countless times
To be fair, we shouldn't bundle Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with John MacArthur and Joel Osteen. Meaning that some religious thought is more philosophically robust than other religious thought.
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