ok actually upon closer inspection, the extension was not a game, just a "learn vim" type of thing. I think I got it mixed up with a vim game I found online.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vinthara...

Well said!! And the hype men selling these LLMs are really playing into this notion. They’ve started saying stuff like “they have phd-level knowledge on every topic”.

I have also used vim macros to do all sorts of text formatting that would have otherwise taken ages!!

One time my girlfriend needed to format a bunch of text, I don’t remember why. It was like a csv but couldn’t be opened in excel because it was badly formatted or something?

Anyway her work computer had vim on it, and I totally saved the day. Pretty much the proudest moment of my life lol. It was like this xkcd, but for vim https://xkcd.com/208/

Learned vim with a game like this. It was a vscode extension, I don’t remember what it was called.

Anyway it’s easily the best time investment I’ve ever made, period. Takes a couple days of messing around, and you can basically never leave modal editing behind! It’s just so much better. I’m still not even a vim master. Just the basic motions and commands are enough to never want to give em up. Throw macros and registers on top… delicious.

Also without vim I never would have tried helix, which is just absolutely the smoothest and most frictionless editing ever. Very minimal setup, too

I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, in terms of signal/noise. LLMs can extract signal from noise (“summarize this fluff-filled 2 page corporate email”) but they can also create a lot of noise around signal (“write me a 2 page email that announces our RTO policy”).

If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.

If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.

Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.

I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.

A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.