My daughter will be growing up as AI imbues itself into society at a deep level. The first place she will feel this is at school. The Homework Apocalypse talks about some of the issues that we are going to start to see over the next couple of years, as students and teachers adapt to the availability of tools like ChatGPT.

Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions.

I’m a bit of a Luddite with respect to AI tools that are designed to help with my work, like GitHub Copilot. I’m starting to think that I should use them, to enable me to better understand the challenges and opportunities she is going to have to deal with in the coming years.

Several years ago, I wrote that I was not a fan of technical debt as a metaphor. I’m still not convinced. But recently, someone I respect wrote about tech debt in Tech debt metaphor maximalism:

I really like the “tech debt” metaphor. A lot of people don’t, but I think that’s because they either don’t extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don’t properly understand financial debt.

So let’s talk about debt!

There’s a lot more detail than I ever thought about, and certainly far more than I wrote down. After one read through, all I know is that I am not sure I was right.

I’m going to add a reminder to read the piece again in a few months, to see what I think after my hindbrain has stewed on it for a while.

At Lagos Zoo, they have several enclosures that you can go inside, to be right up close to the animals. For the flamingos, there’s a little fenced off outcrop into the enclosure rather than it being free-roaming for the humans, but you can still be closer than I’ve been to flamingos before.

I fell back into old habits. Earlier in the year I determined that I should be happy writing shorter pieces here. They need not be epics. And what happened? I looked back today and realised that I’d been working for two months, on and off, on a rather rambling piece about mason.nvim.

What I’d done is decide that I couldn’t just write two paragraphs about what Mason was, even if it covered all I’d wanted to know about Mason when learning nvim. Instead, it was a 500 line odyssey into the Mason code base, which ends up to be quite a trek. Not a messy one, but complex, because the Mason code base does a ton of stuff.

And in the end, doing the required drafting work to explain the code was too much. It was too much work, and I wasn’t really convinced there was much point to it. So the post got to a certain point and just sat there. I’d satisfied my itch to understand more about Mason, but I didn’t have the time to write that up in a comprehensible way.

So, instead, here’s the two eight paragraphs about Mason that I wish I’d read.

There seem to be a lot of new editors making the rounds at the moment.

I’ve tried Zed. Zed holds a lot of promise, and is fast, but early stages and the Vi mode’s pretty awful (although they know this, and are up for fixing it as they recognise that it is important to a lot of people).

I’ve tried Lapce; quite a lot of features, but felt quite immature in use. Again, a recognition that Vim-like behaviour was important. But it didn’t really feel like one could take it on day-to-day.

And obviously I’ve tried Neovim, and, in Neovim, found an editor I really like.

But now I’m trying out Helix. While Zed and Lapce are GUI-based editors, Helix is a terminal editor. It’s a lot like Vim, but has more batteries included. Also, it has a new way with modal editing that I’ve not used before. Helix is receiving major new functionality at a reasonable pace. It seems like a very promising project.

So far, I’m finding Helix has a sweet spot between being quite new, and yet with enough features for serious use. And it’s not emulating Vim, it just is a “modern Vim” built fresh from the ground up, albeit with the new way with motions and commands that I mentioned (we’ll talk about it in a moment).