Working with Lisp dialects (because of proper Lisp REPL) is nothing short of magic. I hooked up my Emacs AI tools to it. ECA and gptel-agent are able to change any elisp code, run check-parens, apply changes immediately - unload, reload things, changing the behavior of my editor on the fly. I once even have asked a model to use the built-in profiler and it worked. I vibe-coded my MCP servers through Clojure REPL.
On Mac I can poke virtually any aspect of my system - my Hammerspoon config is written in Fennel - has a REPL.
On Linux, I have a babashka loop with nrepl, that "talks" to Hyprland's IPC through a socket - AI can diagnose the state of WM and move things around, change color temp, affect gamma, etc.
I have made little prototypes with nbb and Playwright, and the model had no difficulty understanding the REPL loop - it was able to inspect every DOM element going to it through the REPL.
We have a few services written in Clojure, we keep nrepl on staging k8s cluster. I have vide-coded, fixed and tested things on the go - LLM can directly eval things there. Fixing bugs in Python, Java and Go takes completely different kind of loop - sometimes it feels like AI even gets excited when there's a REPL to mess around.
If anything - being a lisper in AI-era only reinforced my belief that making a deliberate choice to learn and understand the philosophy of Lisp years ago was the best choice I could've made. I future-proofed myself for decades.
Working with Lisp for a human programmer requires mindset adjustment - AI is no different here - you just have to tell it where the REPL is.
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Working with Lisp dialects (because of proper Lisp REPL) is nothing short of magic. I hooked up my Emacs AI tools to it. ECA and gptel-agent are able to change any elisp code, run check-parens, apply changes immediately - unload, reload things, changing the behavior of my editor on the fly. I once even have asked a model to use the built-in profiler and it worked. I vibe-coded my MCP servers through Clojure REPL.
On Mac I can poke virtually any aspect of my system - my Hammerspoon config is written in Fennel - has a REPL.
On Linux, I have a babashka loop with nrepl, that "talks" to Hyprland's IPC through a socket - AI can diagnose the state of WM and move things around, change color temp, affect gamma, etc.
I have made little prototypes with nbb and Playwright, and the model had no difficulty understanding the REPL loop - it was able to inspect every DOM element going to it through the REPL.
We have a few services written in Clojure, we keep nrepl on staging k8s cluster. I have vide-coded, fixed and tested things on the go - LLM can directly eval things there. Fixing bugs in Python, Java and Go takes completely different kind of loop - sometimes it feels like AI even gets excited when there's a REPL to mess around.
If anything - being a lisper in AI-era only reinforced my belief that making a deliberate choice to learn and understand the philosophy of Lisp years ago was the best choice I could've made. I future-proofed myself for decades.
Working with Lisp for a human programmer requires mindset adjustment - AI is no different here - you just have to tell it where the REPL is.