Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...

Oh I want to pipe up here. I'll share a little bit about what I've been
doing in lisp while I'm at it.

Some of you might have seen me pop up in here asking some strange looking
questions at times, time to show and tell.

The main project I've been working on is an extensible launcher platform
for a Gaming handheld machine called the Steam Deck. I started off writing
this in python as a FOSS project, but since the community turned out to be
basically me, I ditched the efforts there in favour of finally learning
Common Lisp properly.

I started off using these AI tools (co-pilot, chat gpt etc), as a test.
With python it was yielding somewhat ok results initially. Here's the open
source repo for those interested: https://github.com/ebenbruyns/junkstore

I ran into problems with it pretty quickly. I can say with reasonable
certainty that every single hard to find bug was casually introduced by
these AI systems being "helpful". They've created many subtle race
conditions that took hours or days to debug, and once I looked at the code
I realised that I would never have written it that way to start with.

I'll give you guys some hours spent on this just so you can have context
and put it all in perspective. The FOSS code took around 1000 hours to
develop, test debug etc. I have another component written in python too
that adds functionality to the FOSS version that's paid and took
another 400 hours or so.

When I decided to stop writing open source and in Python I switched to
Lispworks (best decision ever). I've spent another 4500-5000 hours working
on this new version, but AI can't code lisp. Instead what I found was that
all the tasks I used AI for I could just abstract away in macros, clos and
other lisp specific goodness that made the AI obsolete really.

You can see the application here: https://www.junkstore.xyz/

Then a few weeks ago I talked to a friend and they put me onto Claude code.
The results have been a mixed bag. I'm doing some pretty heavy reverse
engineering stuff (as you can imagine with a project like this), and it's
helped me build some tools to aid in this very quickly, but it destroys
things as quickly as it can create them. It's been a wild roller coaster
of  2 weeks with this thing and I think if I just coded stuff in lisp I
could potentially have done a lot more in that time.

But it's not all been wasted. My wife, who is not a programmer, has been
using Claude code to crunch, twist and bend the website. I think the
results are pretty decent. As an experiment I thought I'd throw her the
secure portal UI (since all the real code is in services the security
aspect is abstracted away from it and it's just user experience that can
get affected). I have to say the results and the speed at which she was
able to do things is incredible. I did have to review the code, and I
actually need to review the code much closer than I would with human devs.
The problem is that you can't tell them why something is bad and not to do
it again, they don't remember. So you have to check for the same stuff over
and over again.

I think there's certainly value in these tools, but I don't think the value
is as much as the industry wants you to believe. The real trick would be to
find a way to put these tools on rails and keep them on rails.

I've done some experimentation with setting these tools up with testing
feedback loops and you can get better results if you do that, but it's
still an exercise in frustration most of the time. If I had the resources
I'd get my hands on some serious hardware that can run a "large" small
language model or something and specialise that on the stuff I'm doing, to
see if that yielded better results. Living on a sailboat with solar power
and using a 15w power budget on my machine doesn't really leave much room
for this type of thing though.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this as I think it might be interesting to
some of you.

Regards,

Eben Bruyns


On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 06:24, Alexey Veretennikov (as alexey dot
veretennikov at protonmail dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes indeed Claude could write Lisp code now. I've tried and it works for
> some primitive functions/algorithms. I successfully used it with Aider for
> CL code.
> I would love to see some MCP agents with integration to popular APIs in
> LW, so we can try to use it at least in chat mode with ability to modify
> open files.
> Would be also nice to have a feature in Editor for auto-reverting modified
> buffers, so integration with command line tools like Aider could be easier.
> I've submitted the feature request for that and hope it is not a huge work
> to do, it would help a lot.
> Would be nice as well to have a terminal with ansi colors support so we
> can launch i.e. aider directly from LW.
>
> BR,
> /Alexey
>
>
> On Thursday, August 7th, 2025 at 20:14, Arnold Noronha (as arnold at tdrhq
> dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Claude (not Claude Code, not Claude Chat, but the Anthropic API)
> > actually writes Lisp really well, as long as you give it the right
> > context because everyone's Lisp code looks different.
> >
> > It even handled CAPI quite nicely, even though it hallucinated a bit..
> > but close enough to guide me through my first CAPI app.
> >
> > It's also remarkably good at writing Elisp, which makes it easier to
> > write dev tools. I used that to bootstrap a little Cursor like Emacs
> > integration, which I use almost daily now.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Arnold
> >
> > On Thu, 2025-08-07 at 09:59 -0700, David McClain (as dbm at refined-
> > audiometrics dot com) wrote:
> >
> > > I finally caved in this morning and tried ChatGPT. I am long familiar
> > > with “AI” in its present state, having directly used Perception,
> > > Kohonen, and Probabilistic networks back in the 1990’s for control of
> > > “rubber mirrors”, target tracking for missile guidance, etc, etc.
> > >
> > > I was holding off because this is not AI, just a recognizer of
> > > patterns with an ability to generalize. Komogorov wrote a theorem a
> > > while back that a feedback perceptron network with N inputs +
> > > feedback can emulate an Nth degree attractor in high dimensional
> > > fractal systems. That’s why we could use the rubber mirror to cancel
> > > out atmospheric scintillation of star images on the Kitt Peak 4m
> > > telescope back in the early 90’s.
> > >
> > > At any rate, I saw a video expressing the virtues of ChatGPT for web
> > > search, rather than Google search, since it doesn’t offer up tons of
> > > extraneous finds based on whomever paid the most to get in front of
> > > your eyeballs. And so I tried it, and it does work better.
> > >
> > > But, as long as you already know a great deal about some topic, you
> > > are prepared for its hallucinations (which I have yet to see), and
> > > its tendency to offer up a consensus opinion as authoritative fact.
> > > You have to push back and challenge its answers, and that generally
> > > provokes an even better response.
> > >
> > > So, along the lines of a discussion about Transactional Conventional
> > > Hewitt Actors, it offered up the statement at one point about
> > > parallel concurrent activation of the same Actor by two different
> > > dispatch threads sending two different messages at the same time:
> > >
> > > "You retry only if the actor behavior was concurrently
> > > changed, which is rare in practice if messages are processed
> > > quickly.”
> > >
> > > I challenged that as an opinion, not fact, since I had the experience
> > > of a debug monitor Actor becoming overwhelmed by parallel message
> > > collisions in my Ionosphere Watch System:
> > >
> > > "Your statement "You retry only if the actor behavior was
> > > concurrently changed, which is rare in practice if messages are
> > > processed quickly." is just a (hopeful) opinion. It could very well
> > > happen that collisions in some situations could happen very
> > > frequently.”
> > >
> > > To which it acknowledged my criticism as valid, and offered an even
> > > better answer, mentioning an exponential back-off, like we use in
> > > TCP/IP and Transactional Memory systems.
> > >
> > > That was an interesting suggestion, but I can probably get by just
> > > using a “put the collision message back on the queue for later
> > > delivery attempts”, instead of a direct immediate retry with an
> > > exponential back-off.
> > >
> > > At any rate, I am now willing to concede that ChatGPT may be useful,
> > > especially if you are alone in a room staring at 4 walls. But I’m
> > > still not willing to consider it true AI. And I haven’t allowed it to
> > > write any Lisp for me. Maybe someday...
> > >
> > > - DM
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > [email protected]
> > http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html
>
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