I'm working on a Math product as a side project and AI is really bad at writing Lean, too
Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
31–40 of 104 posts
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#32Be careful what you wish for
"Elegant weapons for a more civilized age."
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#33This rings true for me. LLMs in my experience are great at Go, a little less good at Java, and much less good at GCL (internal config language). This is definitely partly training data, but if you give an LLM a simple language to use on the fly it can usually do ok. I think the real problem is complexity. Go and Java require very little mental modelling of the problem, everything is written down on the page really qu…
How many docs do you put in the context? we maintain a lot of dsl code internally, and each file has a copy of the spec + guide as a comment at the top. Its about 50 locs and the relevant models are great at writing it.
Oh yeah the models are great at writing the DSLs, there are enough examples to do that very effectively. It's the building of the DSL, which is implemented in the config language, which is tricky. i.e, writing a new A/B test in the language is trivial, writing an A/B testing config DSL in the language is hard.
The main problem is the dynamic scoping (as opposed to lexical scoping like most languages), and the fact that lots of things are untyped and implicitly referenced.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#34[dead]
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#35I have found it to be the complete opposite tbh. Not lisp but I've been generating Scheme with claude for about 5 months and it's a pleasure. What I did was to make sure CLAUDE.md had clear examples and also I added a skill that leverages ast-grep for ast-safe replacement (the biggest pain is that some times claude will mess up the parens, but even lately it came up with its own python scripts to count the parens and balance the expressions on its own).
I created Schematra[1] and also a schematra-starter-kit[2] that can be spun from claude and create a project and get you ready in less than 5 minutes. I've created 10+ side projects this way and it's been a great joy. I even added a scheme reviewer agent that is extremely strict and focus on scheme best practices (it's all in the starter kit, btw)
I don't think the lack of training material makes LLMs poor at writing lisp. I think it's the lack of guidelines, and if you add enough of them, the fact that lisp has inherently such a simple pattern & grammar that it makes it a prime candidate (IMO) for code generation.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#36[dead]
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#37From my experience Claude Code is not that bad with Common Lisp and can do REPL-style development. I've been using this MCP server (an older version with some tweaks): https://github.com/cl-ai-project/cl-mcp
(even though I'd probably prefer some MCP-to-swank adapter if it existed)
And this MCP server works quite well for Emacs
https://github.com/rhblind/emacs-mcp-server
There are some issues of course. Sometimes, Claude Code gets into "parenthesis counting loop" which is somewhat hilarious, but luckily this doesn't really happen too often for me. In the worst case I fix the problematic fragment myself and then let it continue. But overall I'd say Claude Code is not bad at all with Lisps
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#38I'm finding the opposite: Claude Code is strikingly good at Common Lisp (unsurprising given how much CL material would have made it into the training set), and even much better than I expected with Arc.
However, a large part of OP is about REPLs and on that I've also had a hard time with CC. I was working on it this evening in fact, and while I got something running, it's clunky and slow.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#39> I wonder what adaptations will be necessary to make AIs work better on Lisp. Some are going to nitpick that Clojure isn't as lispy as, say, Common Lisp but I did experiment with Claude Code CLI and my paid Anthropic subscription (Sonnet 4.6 mostly) and Clojure. It is okay'ish. I got it to write a topological sort and pure (no side effect) functions taking in and returning non-totally-trivial data structures (maps i…
I think you're right. Try asking GPT-5 this: > Are the parentheses in ((((()))))) balanced? There was a thread about this the other day [1]. It's the same issue as "count the r's in strawberry." Tokenization makes it hard to count characters. If you put that string into OpenAI's tokenizer, [2] this is how they are grouped: Token 1: (((( Token 2: ())) Token 3: ))) Which of course isn't at all how our minds would group…
Don’t ask the LLM to do that directly: ask it to write a program to answer the question, then have it run the program. It works much better that way.
Re: Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
#40Claude has really helped me improve my Emacs config (elisp) substantially, and sometimes even fix issues I've found in packages. My emacs setup is best it has ever been. Can't say it just works and produces the best solution and sometimes it would f** up with closing parens or even make things up (e.g. it suggest load-theme-hook which doesn't exist). But overall, changing things in Emacs and learning elisp is definit…
I used Emacs for about a decade and then switched to VS Code about eight years ago. I was curious about the state of Claude Code integration with Emacs, so I installed it to try out a couple of the Claude packages. My old .emacs.d that I toiled many hours to build is somewhere on some old hard drive, so I decided to just use Claude code to configure Emacs from scratch with a set of sane defaults. I proceeded to spend…
Came to post exactly this, except it’s got me using emacs again. I led myself into some mild psychosis where I attempted to mimic the Acme editor’s windowing system, but I recovered