Every serious piece of software eventually grows a scripting layer, a plugin ecosystem, and a config file that nobody fully understands. Thomas Ptacek calls this the Emacsification of Software — the slow drift where tools stop being tools and start being platforms you live inside.
You see it everywhere now. VS Code is basically an OS with a text editor bolted on. Obsidian, Figma, even Notion — all of them shipping plugin APIs and community marketplaces. The pattern is the same: build a fast core, expose extension points, let users grow the weird stuff you'd never prioritize.
The trade-off is real though. Emacs power users have been productive for decades, but the on-ramp is brutal and the ecosystem fractures with every fork. When your IDE has 40 extensions, your config is now a software project. Nobody told you that you signed up to maintain a distro.
AI agents are about to accelerate this hard. LLMs make writing plugins trivial, which means tools will grow extensions faster than humans can audit them. The endgame isn't fewer tools — it's every tool turning into a runtime.
If you're building dev tools today, ship the extension API on day one. The lock-in isn't your features, it's the plugins your users wrote on a Sunday afternoon.
