My 2015 MacBook Air (model 7,2, for those keeping score) had been officially declared a vintage by Apple: no further OS updates, no support path, no security (ulp) patches.

Which is a funny thing to say about a computer that still boots in under ten seconds, weighs nothing, and fits in a sleeve the dimensions of a manila folder as Steve (RIP) once showed on the stage at the Moscone Center.

I’d picked it up second-hand for $150. For that sum, I got: a 13-inch aluminum chassis with good bones, a loose-ish (not a compliment) keyboard that is miles ahead of Chromebooks and other economy machines, and a respectable battery life. Apple had abandoned it. I had not.

I’ve written a lot about editors here over the years (editors, vim). But I’m starting to sense something interesting. For programmers who have adopted AI and agentic workflows, the IDE may be hindering productivity.

And even for those who, like myself, prefer a minimalist experience (tmux/zellij + editor), I think we might need to update our workflows as well.

Lately I’ve been replacing VSCode and tmux+vim with a window and pane configuration that prioritizes the Claude Code session over the editor. I’ve also been using my phone + claude --remote more. Let me share some of my new workflow.

Around 2001, I needed to learn Perl. The primary means for doing so was Programming Perl by Wall, Orwant, and Christiansen — and indeed I did learn Perl, and spent an early part of my career using it as the glue language that made all sorts of impossible tasks possible (there are legacy posts recorded here that attest to this).

But the book had three surprising gifts that have stayed with me far longer than the syntax.

• A model for how to teach with a linguistics inflected, recursively absurd humor
• A preview of the wonder of watching a toddler learn to speak
• An absurdist hello-world I have carried into every language since: razzle