A future I was not expecting

Ever since Cursor came out, I started low-key counting the days until I had to switch away from vim / tmux. I took as a given that the productivity gains from an AI powered editor would be too great to ignore, and started to see my insistence on being terminal based as a my own little fun eccentric trait that would finally be gone soon...

And then agentic coding tools have taken an unexpected turn: The best ones are terminal based and unixy. And at least in the case of Claude Code, for the same reasons that initially drove me to the terminal:

'So small and so flexible that it fits any workflow'

'The thinnest possible layer on top of the model'

Both phrases I've heard from the creator.

I have been using it heavily in the last month: Initially i trialed it for prototypes and PoCs at work, then making progress on personal projects that have been stuck for years in some cases, but I can't stop finding new uses:

• Clicking around too much in the AWS console? Wait there's the aws-cli!
• Debugging github actions? gh cli to the rescue
• That thing i dread to do every 3 months where i have to duplicate 12 page documents and replace a few values? CC can figure out the binary format and replace it for me.

It's unlocking so many venues to explore that I had previously dismissed as too tedious or too much work to do I just can't stop. I'm not surprised to hear the terms Slot Machine and Addiction and Sleep Problems thrown in the same sentence as agentic engineering,

The double twist is that now the editor matters significantly less, as I'm using it less and less. Maybe I can even look at vs-code. I don't really care.