As someone who hasn’t felt that magic with a repl and LLM’s, how do you integrate the two? Does it have to be in emacs and every buffer is accessible by a LLM?
That however doesn't really work well with other languages like Clojure - LLM can poke into clj REPL from the Emacs REPL by tapping to it through emacsclient, in practice - these layers start leaking pretty quickly. For Clojure (or Lisps in general), you need something that changes the fundamental model of how agents work, which is roughly the Unix/pipe model. Agent spawns process -> reads stdout/stderr -> spawns next process. State lives in files. Each tool invocation is stateless. This works for languages with batch-style toolchains (compile, test, run - pretty much any non-lispy lang). An agent that edits files and re-runs `clj` is doing something fundamentally different from what a Clojure developer does.
For Lisps, you need persistent nrepl connection, eval-in-namespace as the primary tool, ability to inspect live values, hot-reload awareness - not "run clj test and parse the output". For that you need specialized MCP. There are plenty of existing solutions. I built mine in Clojure (in babashka)¹. But that's because I use Emacs. If I was using VSCode, I'd probably use BackSeatDriver²
The main point is - Lisp REPLs are great and powerful, and there's no significant obstacle not to utilize them with LLMs. If you're using a homoiconic language and not utilizing the full power of the REPL, really, why?
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¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions/tree/main/tools/...
² https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/awesome-backseat-drive...
I’ll look into the links and mentioned programs. Thank you.
And Clojure, unlike Haskell, is way more down-to-earth and enormously practical. I'm not saying Haskell is not, but let's be honest, for anyone to start writing production-grade Haskell would take weeks, not hours. While Clojure needs minutes. These days you can just download the Calva VSCode extension and start playing with it.
Even if one thinks "there's just no way to use it at work", there are so many smaller things they could use it to improve their personal workflows. "Of course, when you only know a hammer, everything looks like a nail", someone might say. Yet, for me, who has seen, learned and used dozens of different "hammers", this one does look quite interesting. For a bunch of pragmatic reasons. And my message to any "hammer-wielding craftsman" - you really don't need to try dozens of hammers to see the value in a good one, and Clojure is a pretty darn good one, I promise.