An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

Post by chumzygood » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

Post by hnlmorg » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #52

hnlmorg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the code in agents is to handle unhappy paths and human friendly interfaces. I’m sure you could trim most languages core loop too if you discarded all the stuff that actually make agents peasant to use.

Please do show the equivalent of those ~8 lines in the other languages you think of so we can explicitly compare :) I gave it a try in the other languages I know, the Clojure one I have still ends up the smallest and fastest to comprehend.

Post by zingar » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #8

goranmoomin wrote: post #7

I like Lisp, I’ve used Common Lisp with a passion, but this doesn’t seem like a valid argument for Lisp. Homoiconicity, as I understand, is that the code is structured data that is easy to programmatically modify, hence allowing Lisp macros. While some might disagree, I see Rust macros as the closest thing that demonstrates homoiconicity in mainstream Algol-based languages, as Rust macros modify the loosely structure…

A Lisp program that writes a Lisp program really just needs to produce a list of (nested lists) of tokens. A JavaScript program that writes a javascript program needs to generate a string that is syntactically valid JavaScript code. That is a much bigger task than just constructing a (nested) list. Because Lisp syntax is so much simpler than that of JavaScript etc. it is much easier to avoid errors when generating co…

Post by tosh » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

  import json,sys,uuid;from subprocess import getoutput as sh;from urllib.request import Request as R,urlopen
  b={"model":"gpt-5.6","prompt_cache_key":uuid.uuid4().hex,"input":[],"tools":[{"type":"custom","name":"shell"}]}
  while prompt:=input("> "):
      b["input"]+=[{"role":"user","content":prompt}]
      while True:
          o=(r:=json.load(urlopen(R(sys.argv[1],json.dumps(b).encode(),{"Content-Type":"application/json"}))))["output"]
          b["input"]+=o;calls=[i for i in o if i["type"]=="custom_tool_call"];used=r["usage"]["total_tokens"]/10500
          if not calls: print(o[-1]["content"][0]["text"],f'\n[{used:06.3f}%]'); break
          b["input"]+=[{"type":"custom_tool_call_output","call_id":i["call_id"],"output":sh(i["input"])} for i in calls]

Post by tosh » Sun, Jul 12, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

tosh wrote: post #57

9 lines of python: import json,sys,uuid;from subprocess import getoutput as sh;from urllib.request import Request as R,urlopen b={"model":"gpt-5.6","prompt_cache_key":uuid.uuid4().hex,"input":[],"tools":[{"type":"custom","name":"shell"}]} while prompt:=input("> "): b["input"]+=[{"role":"user","content":prompt}] while True: o=(r:=json.load(urlopen(R(sys.argv[1],json.dumps(b).encode(),{"Content-Type":"application/json"…