This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning:
>If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in.
This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates.
To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP and a pretty good OS in Windows 7 respectively. No longer is that an option, your workflow will simply be interrupted by automatic updates.
>Vim and Emacs, in their infinite customizability, can be molded to fit your exact hand and workflow
Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. I trust vim not just because it can do a ton of shit (although that is certainly nice), but because unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change. Aside from switching from vim to neovim (my decision, not a forced update), my muscle memory from a couple decades ago still works today.
> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP
This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?
Indeed it makes no sense at all, because Windows 2000 even came out before Windows ME.
This is part of why my text editor is built from source on my own branch where I only occasionally pull in changes from master. I know I'm probably a very rare exception here.
> Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP
Prior to XP, MS had two lines of Windows: the Windows 9x kernels and the Windows NT kernels. Windows XP was meant to be the merger of the two lines, adapting Windows NT to have compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98 features. Unfortunately, Windows XP development went overlong, so MS wedged in Windows ME to give a stop-gap release until XP could actually be released.
A good tool does a job well with minimal side effects and maximal predictability.
Perhaps this is why users dislike monthly SaaS - they cannot trust stability of the tool, because often the incentives are to keep adding features well past peak utility [ resulting in enshitification ]
followup .. one reason I now love and detest C++ is the regularity of new features in the core working set [ particularly the current politically correct incarnation of the smart pointer. ]