--- title: The thing that brought me joy | daily.dev description: A developer reflects on the emotional impact of AI coding agents after 20 years of using Vim/Neovim. Initially dismissing AI tools as inadequate, they recently... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-thing-that-brought-me-joy-vfzyynk3z twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The thing that brought me joy | daily.dev og:description: A developer reflects on the emotional impact of AI coding agents after 20 years of using Vim/Neovim. Initially dismissing AI tools as inadequate, they recently... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-thing-that-brought-me-joy-vfzyynk3z og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/vFzyyNK3z.png og:image:alt: The thing that brought me joy og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The thing that brought me joy **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 2 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary A developer reflects on the emotional impact of AI coding agents after 20 years of using Vim/Neovim. Initially dismissing AI tools as inadequate, they recently found them "good enough" to question whether learning fundamental tools like awk and sed still makes sense. The piece explores the tension between efficiency gains and the loss of joy that came from writing code itself, questioning what remains when the craft that brought satisfaction becomes automated. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@theacademe** · 0 upvotes > Maybe it's a shift in perspective to learning about the tools from the AI coding assistants. Asking your coding assistant to generate a line or two for your application or shell script to accomplish the goal you want. Then thinking, "*Huh, I never would have thought to do it that way. It's kind of cool that it was able to **'borrow'** this idea from someone on GitHub and show it to me*." > It's even better when you ask your coding assistant where it saw that code, and go review the original source. I often learn two other things. And end up dropping a star on GitHub. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Something About Coding Stopped Feeling Good — and It Took Me a While to Figure Out What](https://daily.dev/posts/something-about-coding-stopped-feeling-good-and-it-took-me-a-while-to-figure-out-what-3i9mrgkxo) · DEV · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI is slowly munching away my passion](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-slowly-munching-away-my-passion-ny3obiud2) · Lobsters · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI](https://daily.dev/posts/emacs-and-vim-in-the-age-of-ai-c9owpjrch) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [You had a story](https://daily.dev/posts/you-had-a-story-aluw9sjxe) · Read the Tea Leaves · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#devtools](https://daily.dev/tags/devtools), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-thing-that-brought-me-joy-vfzyynk3z) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The thing that brought me joy","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-thing-that-brought-me-joy-vfzyynk3z","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-thing-that-brought-me-joy-vfzyynk3z"},"datePublished":"2026-01-18T05:11:55.884Z","dateModified":"2026-01-18T05:12:18.150Z","description":"A developer reflects on the emotional impact of AI coding agents after 20 years of using Vim/Neovim. 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