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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

It is. I'm amazed at how quickly agents can work with my Clojure code base and try things out. They make great use of the REPL.

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I dabble with clojure for some hobby projects. What's the preferred way of setting up the agent to use the repl these days? I had trouble getting the agent to use it in the past.

https://github.com/babashka/nrepl-client

I use clojure-mcp for that and never thought about anything else.

Can it already reliably close parens? I was disappointed some time ago, but sounds like it's ready for a new go...?

This was a problem with early models, I would say more than a year ago, and even then, this problem was solved completely by using the clojure-mcp tools for editing.

Today you don't even need to use clojure-mcp for balanced editing. The models do a perfectly fine job.

Thanks! Yeah, it was probably over a year ago that I tried it. Just the thought of a statistical program coding lisp while picking the number of closing parens based on a hunch made me shiver.

I'm amazed by such questions, really.

This was true with gpt-3.5, but things have moved on, dude !

It's like asking 'do movies have sound now?'. The answer is Yes, not just sound, but also color !

No, the problem still exists. It just got better.

I don't know if it's quite the same. To not have seen movies with sound would have required living under a rock for decades. To not know if the paren problem has been fixed only requires not having tried it for a year, and not being part of any lisp communities.

I'm the first one to admit my ignorance when it comes to LLM capabilities. Hence the honest question.

He shouldn't be downvoted, but I haven't seen broken parens in a while.

Opus 5.5 has improved a lot on this side. I used to be so frustrated with it breaking the codebase.

Clojure / ClojureScript codebase

The trick before was to have really short files, max 50 LOC or so, and they were OK at balancing parens. Nowadays, most SOTA models seem to be able to handle it regardless of LOC in file.

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