the copy-editing experience

manual typing and coding was so fun – until it became inefficient.

heads up: this post is mostly about vim and the general experience of using it for copy-editing.

for many years when I was in college, I’ve never been a big fan of vim. I was first introduced to it by one of my teachers – saying that he can code and edit code so efficiently it feels illegal to go back to a non-vim mode.

then he demonstrated that to us.

and it was, well, mediocre at best. He was fast and the idea of never leaving your keyboard made sense to me, but the complexity and effort made it feel kinda not worth it.

I could not be so wrong.

years later, I discovered ThePrimeagen (go check him out). Apart from his meme software content, I am very amazed by how fast he can code, switch to another file (or buffer, if you will), go to a function signature, go to the terminal, run a command, and so on, while constantly talking and thinking out loud.

that, that is what feels right to me.

so I learned vim. I started with nvim, and then lazyvim. From there, it became a rabbit hole of personalization and customization: install plugins, enable this, disable that, tinker with the settings, learn Lua (?), etc. I even went further and brought that obsession to my terminal (Ghostty, btw), set up a bunch of things to my preferences so I never have to leave it.

and it was SO FUN, it really is. I think I’ve never enjoyed working with my machine that much.

and you know what’s the best part? The joy extended to my job as well: coding.

so you see, vim and vim motion is born for coding (I never fact check this but there are many reasons to believe so). So now, by enjoying working with my machine, I suddenly enjoy working for my job as well (!). And thus, here comes the productivity baby.

or so I thought.

as soon as I’m used to vim-ing every day comes the age of AI. Manual typing already feels like a waste of time. Well I told you, I’m so heavily affected by SNS – this take prolly comes from X. AI is generating my code, writing my e-mails, answering my messages, scheduling my meetings. I don’t even have to type! With many “semantic” on-device speech-to-text (STT) tools, now I can just talk to the AI.

so the original premise is still there: I do things faster, I do not need to constantly switch context, I don’t need to leave my keyboard, and I’m being very efficient. But still, I cannot feel the same – quite the opposite even. I feel like I’m being stripped of the joy of coding, of typing, of copy-editing.

you know, nothing is more rewarding than spending countless hours debugging your code to finally see it compile, or spending hours searching your hyperparameters to finally see the loss drop. The dopamine hit is insane.

I know, nothing is preventing me from winding up nvim right now and starting to write code. But doing something you know is sub-optimal just doesn’t feel that good.

maybe this is just me being conservative and stubborn. But yeah, the experience I’ve had is amazing, and now it has become something exotic that bothers me.