icl

I enjoyed reading this. Thank you for sharing. I learned Common Lisp years ago while working in the AI lab at the University of Toronto, and parts of this article resonated strongly with me. However, if you abandon the idea of REPL-driven development, then the frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI are actually very capable of writing Lisp code. They struggle sometimes editing it (messing up parens)), but usually the first pass is pretty good. I've been on an LLM kick the past few months, and two of my favorite AI-coded (mostly) projects are, interestingly, REPL-focused. icl (https://github.com/atgreen/icl) is a TUI and browser-based front end for your CL REPL designed to make REPL programming for humans more fun, whether you use it stand-alone, or as an Emacs companion. Even more fun is whistler (https://github.com/atgreen/whistle

New projects are making the newcomer experience easier: - ICL https://github.com/atgreen/icl/ a full featured REPL in the terminal and the browser. - JSCL's playground 100% in the browser https://wiki3-ai.github.io/jscl-kernel/ (very new) - constantly new editor plugins. A new one: Zed https://github.com/etyurkin/zed-cl (all editors, for readers, including VSCode, Pulsar etc: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Those editors appeared in recent years. So, I see a good trend in the ecosystem).

Hey pjmlp -- your comment inspired me to do some additional work. From the text console, you can run the ,brower command and it will open up your browser with a REPL on the same lisp image. The browser-based REPL has many interesting features .. too many to mention here. Please check it out again at https://github.com/atgreen/icl Thank you!

I created this because sometimes I want more than rlwrap but less than emacs. icl aims to hit that middle sweet spot. It's a terminal application with context-aware auto-complete, an interactive object inspector, auto-indentation, syntax colouring, persistent history, and much more. It uses sly to communicate with the child lisp process and aims to be compatible with any sly-supporting implementation. I hope others find it useful!