Faster than the speed of RTFM

Lately, I have been adding a ridiculous amount of new functionality to Emacs using Generative A.I. tools like Google’s Gemini.

It has gotten to the point where I realise only much later that the function I generated to do a thing already exists. I just hadn’t read the manual.

Case in point. I use Denote, a note taking package in Emacs that uses among others, the .org file format. Sometimes I need to refer to these notes on my mobile phone, and given the low number of choices for apps that work with the format, I settled for Logseq which kind of supports .org files. It works reasonably well, except there are some differences in how each one handles the syntax, so I generated over a dozen small functions that make Denote and Logseq more interoperable.

I discovered only later that some of these functions already exist in Denote in one form or another.

I find it crazy that in 2026 it takes less time to generate new functionality than it takes to read the manual.

Of course the code is most likely khichdi, but since I am not a programmer all I know is that it works, so I am keeping it.