Tools that don’t betray

Tonight I wrote notes in vim. No pop-ups. No “assistants.” No background traffic. Just me and the text.

I ran grep on old logs, sed on fragments, awk on datasets. Tools that are simple, brutal, and honest. They don’t flatter me with “help.” They don’t lie with confidence. They just do what I tell them, nothing more.

The contrast with Copilot-infested software is jarring. In Windows, even Notepad became a spy. In Linux, vim still scolds me when I forget a colon. That irritation feels more trustworthy than any polished suggestion I’ve seen in corporate apps.

Trust isn’t about comfort. It’s about predictability. I can predict grep. I can’t predict Copilot.

Maybe the war now isn’t about who controls AI. Maybe it’s about who still remembers how to work without it.