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Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

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Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#51

As a guy who started in lisp I always find LSP to be a weird uncanny valley situation. It's like 99% of a REPL, but it will always have corner cases where that 1% difference is important.

I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful.

Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#52
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use “we” hopefully you are referring to someone on your team. Just be careful, the first step down the rabbit hole of AI psychosis is humanization of LLM.

It’s me and my plucky gang of agents!

Nah as long as you don't give them first-names, I think you should be ok. also:

Pretty pleaser please people don't get your agents registered as direct-reports in the org-chart with HR!

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#54
Anyone noticed how Gemini in antigravity often devolve into catting scripts into a python file and the script is just a search and replace against an existing file. So and edit operation becomes

1. Use bash to stream code into a new file

2. Run file

3. Check the change step 2 did.

4. Delete file from step 1

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#57
post #51

As a guy who started in lisp I always find LSP to be a weird uncanny valley situation. It's like 99% of a REPL, but it will always have corner cases where that 1% difference is important.

I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful. Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

It's the same reason people like symbolic debuggers: you can run your program as many lines at a time as you want and stop and inspect the state whenever you need to. I haven't really used jupyter but I understand the workflow there is very similar.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#58
post #51

As a guy who started in lisp I always find LSP to be a weird uncanny valley situation. It's like 99% of a REPL, but it will always have corner cases where that 1% difference is important.

I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful. Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

Not only Lisp, but Javascript and Ruby (AKA dynamic languages) devs also rely heavily in REPLs, for me at least the reason is that you don't know what value a variable holts, so you need to inspect them somehow, with typed languages you have less reasons to reach such tool.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#59
post #51

As a guy who started in lisp I always find LSP to be a weird uncanny valley situation. It's like 99% of a REPL, but it will always have corner cases where that 1% difference is important.

I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful. Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

[deleted]

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful. Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

Not only Lisp, but Javascript and Ruby (AKA dynamic languages) devs also rely heavily in REPLs, for me at least the reason is that you don't know what value a variable holts, so you need to inspect them somehow, with typed languages you have less reasons to reach such tool.

iPython was famous for a while but I think its popularity has waned, but yes as you point out really any dynamic language can do a repl; it's just that it's mostly the lisp/scheme and forth families that have leaned so heavily into the idea.
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