Interview: Drew DeVault on an AI-free version of Vim

Dr. Jason Polak

Jul 07, 2026

I’m pleased to present an interview with Drew DeVault, a programmer who recently forked the Vim text editor as “Vim Classic”. He did this to make an AI-free version of Vim, the classic Unix text editor developed by the late Bram Moolenaar. Bram developed Vim as an evolution of the original Vi.

The Vim Classic website states, “Vim Classic is a fork of Vim 8.x for long-term maintenance, providing a stable, dependable editor — maintained entirely by humans.”

In particular, it doesn’t use LLM-assisted code. In an age where most programmers are embracing AI, this made me curious. I found some hints to Drew’s thinking on his blog, where he says:

GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies.

Let’s get on with the interview to find out more!

The interview

Jason: So, you released a new version of Vim called “Vim Classic”, which is, as is stated on the project website, “maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools”. First of all, I think that’s awesome because Vim was one of the first text-editors I learned to use...that is, after I figured out how to exit the editor. Haha. But seriously, I really like Vim, and how mastering it leads to more efficient text editing.

I also noticed on your blog that you have a few gripes with generative AI. What I’d like to know is, for you, was creating an AI-free fork of Vim more of a practical matter (i.e. maybe hand-crafted software without AI leads to better software, or software that’s easier to maintain without all those AI pull requests, etc.) or is it more of a philosophical matter relating to how AI is changing the world?

Drew: First of all, I can tell you that we have no intention of making it easier to exit Vim, so you and your readership can rest assured on that point.

Choosing not to use generative AI tools, and organize projects that reject it, is both practical and philosophical, and also more: it’s an ethical and political imperative, and moreover it is a matter of self-preservation.

In practical terms, there are many reasons to reject LLMs. You noted that “sloppy” pull requests are a big problem for projects who don’t reject LLM-assisted contributions, and you’re right. A pragmatic concern which is even more important is the importance of copyright and establishing the provenance of your software — an important job for any FOSS maintainer who accepts public contributions, and one which is utterly impossible when LLMs are involved. Furthermore, it’s been established that the use of LLMs causes “deskilling”, making its users dumber and less competent over time, a fate I have no interest in myself.

In philosophical terms, using AI subverts the craft of software engineering. The hardest part has never been writing code, but knowing what code to write. Software engineering has never been taken seriously as a practice — people have been looking for shortcuts and quick, messy answers for as long as any of us have been doing the job, a sort of “move fast and introduce complexity” approach which leaves excellence out of the equation entirely and leads to things like a micro-dependency culture and all of its problems.

But I have long rejected and advocated against this approach, in favor of a discipline which more resembles the “engineering” from which it takes its name: an understanding of your problem domain, careful thought, reflection, and planning, and executing on the solution within the constraints given. LLMs are the most grotesque rejection of this discipline we’ve seen to date, and it exponentially accelerates the pace at which software can be made even shittier than it already is.

Then there’s the ethical arguments, which are myriad and well-known. The “well-known” fact led me recently to characterize AI users and apologists as “good Germans” (someone emailed me after I said that, actually, and told me it was what convinced them to ditch AI). I feel it’s pointless to rehash the ethical problems that everyone surely ought to understand by now, given that they seem to fall on deaf, cowardly ears, but nonetheless:

The environmental impact of generative AI is astronomical and only worsening as the industry doubles down on impossible growth. The only way these tools “work” in the first place is through a massive expenditure of scarce resources, including, for example, the Greenland ice sheet. The pain is especially felt, as always, by those less privileged than anyone who is going to read your article on this interview: poorer people living near datacenters, who cannot afford the sharp rise in electricity prices; or those who can afford the miracle of widely available cheap phones that the industry has made possible and universal in the last decade, but which is coming to an end as demand for cheap components is entirely consumed by AI datacenters.

AI tools and the companies that make them are also, straightforwardly, killing people. In Gaza, in Iran, and elsewhere, these AI tools are informing decisions to murder innocent people. The current in-vogue LLM, Claude, was allegedly involved in the murder of 120 Iranian children in the February school bombing.

And that brings us to politics: these are tools of the oppressors, and the upper-middle-class software engineers who boost them and legitimize them are tools of the oppressors, too. Generative AI is transparently against the interests of the working class, which, to be clear, includes anyone who makes their living from a salary rather than dividends, i.e. nearly all software engineers. Moreover, AI enables, facilitates, and accelerates the global slide into fascism, even fundamentally as a consequence of the technology, which for example trivializes the mass-production of fascist propaganda, but also through its explicit applications and intended uses for fascist ends. Companies like Palantir and Anthropic are critical to enabling fascism to thrive, thanks to their support of organizations like ICE and the IDF, and are led by out and open anti-democratic authoritarians like Peter Thiel and his colleagues.

So, to me the case against AI is crystal clear, and it ought to be the same to anyone with two brain cells and a conscience.

I could go on, but, err, that’s already a very long answer to an open-ended question. I hope you don’t mind :)

Jason: Wow, you touched on so many important points that I resonate with. I’m especially with you on the environmental damage AI causes, especially in an era where we’ve already caused so much damage. Obviously, we should be using as little energy as possible!

But I also think it’s funny how AI can so easily cause de-skilling as you mentioned, an effect that works effectively on multiple levels, and yet people still go right ahead and use it!

To me it seems absurd because taking a mindful approach to creative projects and giving oneself a blank slate is the most enjoyable part of building something. So, like you, I also think that programming (and more generally, all forms of human expression like photography) should be practiced with “careful thought”.

Drew: I think this keeps happening because propaganda works on everyone, and AI is one of the best forms of propaganda delivery ever conceived of. You get a highly personalized, sycophantic pitch. The entire global economy has been re-organized around AI and this personalized propaganda is nigh inescapable. It takes engagement hacking to an extreme, going so far as to leverage similar tactics as high-control cult groups use to program their members, on a massive and stochastic scale. It’s so dangerous.

Jason: I’d also say that your observation about AI affecting poorer people also makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of how the fossil fuel industry messed up the land and the life of many native tribes living in Ecuador and other parts of South America, with the result being the majority of the wealth and profits going into the bank accounts of the rich.

Drew: Story as old as... well, the East India Company, I suppose? There was a time before the (white) world became so exploitative at scale. Here’s hoping more of that is to come, even if not in our lifetimes.

Jason: Actually, I’ll share another story along these lines about car tires. Of course they’re crucial to the modern industrial system and people just think of them as convenient, but when I lived in Brazil I got an apartment near a tire factory located in a heavily residential area.

Almost every day, the factory would release its waste air, which was saturated with a horrible rubber smell, and I don’t even want to know what was in that. Could I do anything about it? No way. When I walked to and from home, I just had to breathe that air in for an hour. And if the factory were ever moved, it would just be moved to some other place with other people or animals living beside it.

And of course, like you mentioned, militaries and other destructive agencies around the world are into AI big time. Just goes to show how much of our so-called life improvement is really at the expense of other people and animals and ecosystems.

Drew: A political movement you may or may not have heard of that tries to grapple with these ideas is Social Ecology, the school of thought of Murray Bookchin and his like. Degrowth, too — which is often misrepresented as some kind of left-leaning “retvrn” equivalent, but which instead asks us to reconsider capitalist modes of thought and ways of life without necessarily implicating a gross regression of our material conditions.

We need to reimagine our social, ecological, and political ways of life, and these schools of thought might help. AI is definitely not helping.

[Jason’s post-interview note: This is a great topic that ought to be further addressed! And the reader can find more about these ideas in several works, including many books written by Murray Bookchin such as Towards an Ecological Society (1980), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism (1995).]

Jason: I realized I haven’t even asked a second question yet. So, my second question for you is this: so, most programmers I’ve encountered are embracing AI. That’s in fact why I was so surprised and excited to find your AI-free fork of Vim. I’m curious, how do you feel about the rest of the programming (and in general, creative) world, given that people around you with similar interests in skills are diving into AI with reckless abandon?

In other words, does it worry you a lot on a daily basis, or are you just really focused on finding a new purpose in writing and overseeing software that has your careful, human-centric approach at its core?

Drew: Both, in degrees. It comes and it goes, but overall it’s not great for my mental health right now. It’s been clear for a long time that “western society” was in a long period of moral collapse — not the moral collapse right-wing nuts imagine, frothing at the mouth in bathrooms — but the kind where the externalities of our ways of life, the loss of craft and consideration, the commidification of everything from culture to our inner lives to our sense of moral purpose, the gross excess of “polite” society at the expense of the poor... the contradictions become more and more obvious wit

[truncated for AI cost control]