When I learned Vim, the tool was fast but my brain was slow. Seconds of latency while I spun around trying to remember key bindings. Mentally taxing, even though the operations themselves were instant.

Keyboard and microphone

I developed a habit, common in guides for this: when I caught myself doing something that worked but wasn’t ideal - hitting the arrow key five times instead of pressing e for end of word - I’d go back and do it the lazy way. Sometimes three times, to hammer it in. Before long, that general sense of fluency made learning the stragglers easy. It became addictive, actually. The speed of navigating a codebase reflects your comfort with the tool, and there’s something satisfying about that. Like mastery in a video game.

Universal Interfaces

Vim is a universal interface within its bounded context - files, text, following references around a codebase. LLM agents running in the terminal are a universal interface within theirs. And the bounded context of a computer is extremely wide.

I’m struggling to find things I can’t do by talking to an agent as smoothly as I can manually. Write documents, move files. Open any application. Play media. Research via web search. Pull CSVs and crunch numbers in Python. The other day I realised I was still interacting directly with ticketing and repository web UIs when the APIs, CLIs and MCPs were all available. The models were happy to create PRs on my behalf, open pages in my browser, copy links to my clipboard. I just hadn’t thought to ask.

Voice

My primary interface is voice now. I basically don’t type anymore. I found out this week that excluding pauses, I’m at about 300 words per minute when speaking. Typing, I’d never get close - maybe a third of that. Meanwhile the perceived effort is low, because talking just comes naturally in a way that rushing to get words out with my hands doesn’t.

The Point

Comfortable and laziest aren’t the same thing. There’s an old adage about the sysadmin who calls themselves lazy but writes tons of automation code. They’re the real thing. Actually lazy. They keep asking whether something should be manual at all.

I’ve got decades of habits that went from good to bad overnight. This week I’ve found myself back where I was learning Vim six or seven years ago - catching myself doing the comfortable thing, then going back to do it right, in the understanding that there’s probably only a future for one approach.

Anthropic just announced Claude for Enterprise, a more accessible interface for automating ordinary work tasks. The labs are making inroads here. 2026 will probably be the year this goes mainstream.