This is to join in on October 2025's Emacs Blog Carnval: Maintenance

This is an ironic subject for me, because my Emacs config is full of stuff – and some of it I use. I do a lot of experimentation and trying out new packages. Some of them are "oh this cool – I should use it." And, alas, some of it is cool but I find out that I don't really use it. What I have found that I will use things when I put them into my personal Transient menu. Then I guess I will see it and use it more and more often. Overall, I have configured a lot of things and rarely use some of them. One example is notmuch – I archive email from it every day via a cronjob but I rarely search it. I don't consider this a waste of time… I like having a little playground to experiment in. Not everything has to be a main change to my workflow … small tweaks over time can make a big difference.

I should also confess that I'm a horrible Lisp programmer. I can do some basic things but past that I consult my AI programming buddy. It's usually Kagi Assistant with a custom model I came up with via their Custom Assistant interface. I use a custom lens to look at Emacs results and have put in the following prompt:

"You are a seasoned Emacs user. You have been using it for around 30 years and know what the latest packages are and the newest trends. You weigh the opinions on Reddit highly. But you also use Helm over other completion frameworks. You are an expert on Elisp and are willing to help whoever asks you questions."

Sometimes the answer starts with "As a 30 year veteran of Emacs…" and I just chuckle. But the answers get me 85-98% there. I've found this especially handy to integrate packages together. I think it works so well because of how many packages have their source code available and that Elisp has been documented for a long time. But like any AI coding assistant, when it goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong and you start spinning in circles if you aren't careful.