As a programmer for over 2 decades, I permanently stopped using IDEs and text editors this year. It’s really cool to see projects support legacy concepts and ideas though. Love this!
As a programmer for over 2 decades, I permanently stopped using IDEs and text editors this year. It’s really cool to see projects support legacy concepts and ideas though. Love this!
Two decades professionally here too (and nearly three in terms of programming as a whole), and I still use ‘em. Reviewing and adjusting, they make for quite a good experience even in agent-first development with the various nice extensions.
Also I still have to write code by hand, because there’s a whole bunch of edits and adjustments that I’m far faster at shrug
>Also I still have to write code by hand, because there’s a whole bunch of edits and adjustments that I’m far faster at shrug
I'm faster too, in general. The thing is now with AI I'm working on at least 3 to 4 projects in parallel. I tell the AI to do an edit and I context switch to something else.
shrug
I do the same, but 3-4 is simply too many. I would guess you’re smarter than me, because more than 2 and I’m already at a fixed bottleneck of reviewing it (and reviewing my teams output on top)
nah reviews take a while right? You can have 2 or 3 agents running in the background while you review. It has nothing to do with intelligence. You can review one project while having 20 agents run in the background too... your intelligence is conceptually orthogonal to the amount of agents you have running.
I don’t have the mental capacity to do that at that scale. It produces more than I can review.
Then you are probably not interested in this work at all. It is meant to develop Lisp—a language whose primary advantage in 2026 is ergonomics to humans, particularly a certain kind of human. If you're doing 100% agentic development, that advantage disappears and you might as well use something popular and statically typed, like Rust or TypeScript.
> If you're doing 100% agentic development, that advantage disappears
I beg to differ. Turns out, Lisp REPL - an actual, "true" REPL, not something like Python's (which is not the same), is an enormous multiplier for agentic workflows.
a) Lisp code can be very terse yet retain its readability - it never becomes cryptic like APL. Therefore, it's more token efficient. It was actually proven that Clojure is one of the most token-efficient "mainstreamish" PLs. https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages...
b) When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically. Instead of predicting what code will do, it can run it, read the output, adjust, and iterate - the same way a skilled human developer works. Incremental evaluation of forms maps naturally to how an LLM generates tokens.
This isn't some theoretical hand-waving - I experience it every day - my WM on Mac is yabai that gets controlled via Hammerspoon, which uses Lua, which means I can use Fennel, which means I can use Lisp REPL. I would give the LLM a task, something to do with my app windows - it connects to the live REPL and starts analyzing, prototyping and poking into things interactively.
All my custom MCPs are written in babashka (Clojure) https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions - whenever there's a problem or I need to improve my AI harness, LLM just does it from "inside out" and it takes less time and fewer tokens.
My main editor is Emacs - LLM can fully control it. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test the MCP that does that, I made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just to run it, but to play it for real - without losing. It was insane.
And of course, day-to-day I have to deal with non-Lispy, non-homoiconic languages more. And to be honest (even though of course I'm biased in this) static type systems is the exact thing in practice where their advantages feel like stop making any big difference. While Lisp REPL feels far more useful.
Technically, I think this is meant to develop Coalton, which is also statically typed and incredibly effective as a language for agents. All those ergonomic benefits that humans enjoy also allow AIs to develop lisp systems quite rapidly and robustly.
Not true. Are people not interested in archeology or history or museums? Denying such things as invalid is offensive. There are projects to reproduce things from ancient history like the Lycurgus cup.
Same. It's an awkward time to develop a new IDE.
nothing awkward about it.
IMHO, It's a better time than ever to develop a new IDE. Just make one that cares deeply about performance (i.e loads instantly, and always has a snappy response). Make features easy to control. Allow me to turn on only the things I care about and to shut the rest off.
I can't even remember the last time I was impressed by the speed of an IDE, though we have more computing power now than ever. I'd love to see someone new come in and wipe the floor with all of the current contenders.
It’s not awkward at all. It’s a fun project and neat. I support these types of projects. I guess I’m being voted down because people hate IDEs and text editors now.
I think it’s wrong to trash this project just because it’s an older concept.
You are being downvoted for calling IDEs and text editors legacy, which is seen as signalling and not contributing to the conversation.
Oh one Adjective "legacy"? And that threw people off? Ok replace that with "cool" and I wouldn't get downvotes? Geeze
Yes, you can expect people here to read your comments and judge them by their content. Were you expecting otherwise?
Why don't you read my comment again and respond to the comment at hand rather then make some asinine response on how people respond to the "content" of a comment. No shit sherlock.
To spell it out for you, my comment was mayhap a bit more sophisticated for you to comprehend. I was not talking about "content" but the nature of the "content" within my comment and how one irrelevant adjective "legacy" was taken out of hand because it offended you. Why did it offend you? Probably because it's true.