I use them for debugging errors in web handlers.

https://speechcode.local/blog/repl-as-service

Arg. That's embarrassing. The correct link is:

https://speechcode.com/blog/repl-as-service

I'm a huge fan of agent-shell, too. It keeps getting better and better, and it's infinitely customizable, like any good Emacs package.

That used to be a problem, but Claude Code has been doing fine at it for a few months now.

Agreed. For the others, I asked Claude to write a structural edit tool: s-expressions only, insert/replace/... When passed 'tree' it prints a file like

<line>: <s-expr .-separated path>

then eg when passed 'replace 2.1 "(+ x y)"' it returns a new file (as a list of s-exprs).

I’ve been struggling with this. I use Clojure and clj-paren-repair has been helpful (https://github.com/bhauman/clojure-mcp-light/blob/main/src/c...), but it would be even better if the model could be taught to do structural editing, the same way I do in Emacs.

Do you have something in a public repository I can look at?

Thanks, appreciate this also, vibe coding in my own lisp and this has been frustrating

That's good to know. The open weight models are still pretty awful getting stuck in this loop

I've known Joe for decades. I've never heard him describe himself this way, but I can confirm that it is true. He is amazing.

I know a lot of amazing developers, but they never claim to be “elite” or make similar nonsense claims. They let their work speak for itself.

First, read the blog post more carefully. Then read the book Hackers, by Steven Levy. Common Lisp was designed by amazing hackers for amazing hackers. Joe was making a comparison with languages like Java, which has some nice characteristics, but whose designers have repeatedly stated that their goal was pragmatic utility for working developers rather than extreme language power. I'd rather use a language that gives me extreme power, and take the risks.

Amazing hackers are everywhere. Not just in the (tiny) Lisp community.

Unless you think that the inventors of C, C++, Unix, Linux etc. were not amazing hackers?

FreeBSD yes, Linux no

This is the Nordic self-effacement which is so ingrained in American culture due to the high number of German and Scandinavian immigrants of the past. Let's just say that not everyone thinks highly of it.

What an ambitious and impressive project! I'm going to try it.

One note: The home page says "Nothing phones home," but the Bento files I've examined include a cloudflareinsights.com beacon.

Thanks for raising that. It might be in the standard cloudflare/actors SDK I used for Cloudflare Durable Objects. I'll try to disable this behavour and if we couldn't, we'll rip out DO and replace it with something that doesn't phone home. Apologies I wasn't thorough enough here.

Just an update to this phone home issue. I haven't found anything showing that this should be normal behaviour. I'm thinking this may be due to cloudflare challenges due to the traffic spike. In addition to the DO, the whole website sits behind a Cloudflare proxy.

Will keep chipping away at this and update as I learn more.

I'm still having trouble tracking this down the Bento app. There's nothing in the source on cloudflareinsights.com and nothing is connecting to that either when I inspect from Chrome. Could it be from the website? (The website is a GH pages fronted by Cloudflare)

Can you share data or show where this is so I can quickly check?

> include a cloudflareinsights.com beacon.

Agreed that the homepage should not indicate otherwise, but on the plus side with a tool like Bento you can edit the HTML file locally, remove the script tag at the bottom that does that, and never worry about that tracking again!

By ambitious and impressive do you mean for Claude?

Because while cool this is clearly heavily vibe coded.

Actually, for me, being llm generated makes this more impressive because it marks the first real world example of a genuine new product built with ai that I have ever seen.

For 6 years I’ve been reading hype about amazing productivity boosts from this stuff, but until now the expected flood of cool new products never arrived. Just lots of tools and harnesses and swarm coordination stuff to help companies spend more money on the hype cycle.

But finally somebody actually built an app and released it. I call that a milestone.

I'm don't care. If it's good, it's good.

Agreed, but the days of software projects being ambitious or impressive are over.

Because they didn't write all the code by hand? Seems like an odd measurement for determining if a project is ambitious or impressive. Clearly this one is based on the replies here.

Agreed, this ended around the rise of Assembly. Machine code or bust!

Ambition is still a human characteristic.

Eddie Murphy had a great comedy bit based on that car.

I don't understand this comment. They wrote SICP.

Sussman and Abelson are great at teaching.

I'm sure they are, just against the generalization that in class is always strictly necessary as not everyone is Sussman.

Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.