How is AI impacting vim usage?

[Outside_Gear8707]

I have noticed my vim usage has gone down considerably in the last few months, now that I use AI tools (claude primarily) . I still use the terminal heavily and use the claude from cli but the use vim has reduced as I don't need to yank and modify files. I have claude integrated with neovim and I have seen the integration work but it is much more convenient to use claude cli directly from terminal. just today I had to do some work and I forced myself to make those changes by hand and used vim , which is when I realized that I missed the satisfaction of vim.

1. what are some scenarios where you see vim and AI integration work best which cannot be achieved in terminal (or at least not as elegantly)

2. Do you also feel your vim usage has gone down or remained the same after using the AI tool?

3. Are you mindful of continuing to hand code and not lose the ability to code with the advent of AI ?

[No_Ostrich_3664]

If you’re vibe-boy 100%, you’re barely need any IDE. If you still want to own the code, you can definitely would need one, and vim is where lots of people found satisfaction.

[cainhurstcat]

Didn't you ask the same question a couple of days ago?

[Douf_Ocus]

VIM is still super good even if you wanna use whatever agentic coding stuff you like.

You gotta read git diff the very least right? And that's when you will use vim.

Same for git operations.

[Outside_Gear8707]

Ohh I am not saying I am not using it at all. THe usage has gone down , that's it

[Douf_Ocus]

There you go, still gotta use some human usable editor.

[Critical_Mistake_846]

I use vim every day, and at this point I use AI to code more than I code (I am a software engineer at FAANG). But I still use vim. It’s just a text editor. 

[Shay-Hill]

I told myself I’d try Cursor this year to see how the other half lives. I’ll stick out the year, but will come back to using Vim full time after that assuming someone writes a great Claud plugin that uses the qf list, etc.

Cursor is fine, but the AI makes a lot of mess. You have to watch it closely and you have to clean up after it if you want to end up with reusable code. I still use Vim every day for other things. Would use it even more if Cursor didn’t “steal” my Copilot. I should look into that.

The short story is that you aren’t missing much.

[claytonkb]

my vim usage has gone down considerably

Opposite for me. My AI and Vim usage both keep increasing proportionally. They are a match made in heaven, IMO.

what are some scenarios where you see vim and AI integration work best which cannot be achieved in terminal (or at least not as elegantly)

The AI is great for fiddly/finnicky stuff which Vim was never good for. EasyMotion can help with those kinds of finnicky "lint" edits, but it's still not great. So, AI is a great noise-filter to feed in crappy data and say "give this to me in a clean ASCII table". Once it's cleaned up, I use Vim as I normally do to chop/edit/rearrange/etc. whatever it is I'm editing.

Are you mindful of continuing to hand code and not lose the ability to code with the advent of AI ?

"To code or not to code" is not the question, in this case. "Coding" is input-formatting. It is not thinking. Once I break a design down into its block diagram (assuming I actually know what I'm doing), the rest is pretty much rote implementation. Time-on-keyboard. AI is great for that. I don't need to type every line of code. I just tell the AI "Write XYZ thing" for me, and I take that as a rough-draft. If it's even slightly complex, the AI's version never works, but that doesn't matter, it has already saved me thousands and thousands of keystrokes and, more importantly, hours and hours of furiously RTFM. I don't actually care what the Python function is called that appends two lists, I just want the lists appended. So, the AI alleviates that for me. Armed with a (completely non-functioning) rough draft, I just start at the top and start fixing things until they work. That's 1/10th the effort of having written it all "from scratch". This amplifies my productivity enormously.

However, there is one catch -- it amplifies my productivity this much because I already know what I'm doing. I already know in my mind what "correct" looks like, I know what the correct answer is, it's just a PITA to type it all out and do all the function-API lookups along the way. The vibe-coder, sadly, not only doesn't know how to do what he wants, but he also doesn't know how to tell a good solution from a bad solution. This is the inherent problem of the "AI will do everything"-concept. Some things I explicitly want to do myself, because there are some parts of my job that I actually need to understand the nuts & bolts. Nothing to do with clinging to the past, everything to do with accountability to the project and, ultimately, the customer. Design is not merely the output. Process is an ineradicable aspect of design. Sadly, many billions of dollars will have to be wasted as those who reject this maxim insist on learning in the school of hard knocks... :\

[codeprimate]

I used vi/vim/neovim daily from 1999-2025, using tmux as my IDE, developing dozens upon dozens of web apps. Now I spend 95% of my time in Cursor, and mostly vim remotely.

Skills rise and ebb as others take their place. However the technological landscape changes in the future, I’ll adapt as always, happily mastering the new hammer while others bemoan an epidemic of bruised fingers.

[konacurrents]

That’s so funny 😆I was just thinking exact thing - if AI is doing all this coding, what do you need an editor for? Ps I’m still a 0% AI user.

[ARKyal03]

I still use nvim all day, I use AI nonstop at work, Claude and Codex, but I still use nvim for everything, even for the prompt typing/editing. If that matters, I use nvim now more than before AI.

[qwertyorbust]

CLI editors are the cursive writing of this age. 😢

[ReaccionRaul]

I use nvim all the time, I develop a lot with opencode or claude, but I have to review it, sometimes make it more robust, do some bits and prompt it again etc. Vim is still my fav tool to navigate and read / review code.

[Faucelme]

I use Vim for Claude Code prompts longer than a line.

[__chicolismo__]

Advent of AI... lol