I'm exactly on the same boat.
To anybody who want to try, a concrete example, that I have tested in all available LLMs:
Make a prompt to get a common lisp application which makes a "hello triangle" in open gl, without using SDL or any framework, only OpenGL and GLFW bindings.
None of the replies even compiled. I kept asking at least 5 times, with error feedback, to see if AI can do it. It did't work. Never.
The best I got was from gemini, a code where I had to change about 10 lines, absolutely no trivial changes that need to be familiar with opengl and lisp. After doing the changes I asked back, what does it think of the changes, it replied I was wrong, with those changes it will never work.
If anybody can make a prompt that get me that, please let me known...
It sounds like you're using LLMs directly, instead of a coding agent. Agents are capable of testing their own code and using that to fix issues, which is what makes them so powerful.
Using Claude Code, I was able to successfully produce the Hello Triangle you asked for (note that I have never used CL before): https://github.com/philpax/hello-triangle-cl
For reference, here is the transcript of the entire interaction I had with CC (produced with simonw's excellent claude-code-transcripts): https://gisthost.github.io/?7924519b32addbf794c17f4dc7106bc2...
Edit: To better contextualise what it's doing, the detailed transcript page may be useful: https://gisthost.github.io/?7924519b32addbf794c17f4dc7106bc2...
Nice. The code I got running from gemini was much much cleaner, it did not work, but after the manual changes it did work. I will hive it a try with the next task: put text and generate primitives like rectangle, circle, polygon, etc…
"Please write me a program in Common LISP (SBCL is installed) which will render a simple "hello world" triangle in OpenGL. You should use only OpenGL and GLFW (using sbcl's FFI) for this, not any other existing 3D graphics framework."
This worked in codex-cli, albeit it took three rounds of passing back the errors. https://gist.github.com/jamesacraig/9ae0e5ed8ebae3e7fe157f67... has the resulting code.
That is using sb-alien and sb-sys, which basically is no common lisp anymore. That is basically sbcl. I didn’t get anything in that direction (my prompt said nothing about a CL implementation) but I would have rejected it. I just wanted to see glfw and opengl in the :use clause. I have to do something that has to work in Mac, Linux and Windows, with at least ECL, sbcl and ccl.
Yeah, I was just trying to keep to the letter of what you'd said - you asked for it just to use OpenGL/GLFW bindings, not other libraries, so I didn't want to install cl-opengl and cl-glfw, and told it just to use its own FFI.
Well at least ypu and the other commenters made something that worked, which I was unable to do. Seems the key is using a coding agent, not an LLM out of the box like I did.