At risk of making myself unpopular, I'm a neovim user who has ethical aversion to AI. I get a great developer experience and I don't have to worry about Kernighan's law making my code buggy and hard to maintain. I am also concerned about climate change, and AI has huge carbon emissions - (re)training an LLM has been estimated to emit the equivalent CO2e as 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing [source]. I'm concerned that my open source code has been used against its license to train AI through github (find my stuff on codeberg or project owed gitlabs) and so now will be included in proprietary products. I'm also against having to pay subscriptions to a handful of big tech companies because this accelerates wealth inequality and erodes democracy, reducing our chances of turning the ship around before crossing the runaway climate change event horizon.
I do not doubt AI's usefulness, or it's ability to charm and amaze or excite, I do not doubt that it can be used to save lives even (e.g. specific medical use such as identifying cancer early from scans). But I do remember how Nobel thought his invention of dynamite would be great and I'm not going to be taken in by another big tech lie about "don't be evil". We have very weak regulatory powers and a world teetering on the edge of unfathomable suffering.
This is a post about a personal choice of text editor, and I'm not judging folx who choose Cursor (or ai plugins for neovim!) - I respect that opinions differ. But I wanted to share my opinions on my choice, too.