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jadefox 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure how my article even made it onto HN but HN has been my home page for 16 years so I'm pretty stoked.
A quick note, Common Lisp tooling documentation exists in a LOT of places, but I could not find a single beginner friendly map of the full development stack, so had a long chat with various LLM's to spin one up. Regardless of your views on this approach to things I hope the article helps some people get a better mental model of what the pieces are and how they fit together. It's helped me wade through a lot of choices and debug a few things.
arikrahman 5 hours ago [-]
Awesome! I've been reading SICP and Land of Lisp, and wanted to get a good idea of the ecosystem but was overwhelmed by the documentation. Thanks for making it easier for us!
This is cool, haven't seen it before and it takes a different approach entirely. It just clones the source code directly into your project. That can definitely go into the isolation layer slot along with Qlot, CLPM, and ocicl.
Thanks for the pointer.
jadefox 4 hours ago [-]
Updated the article
Keyframe 10 hours ago [-]
This reads like AI generated text, which it probably is.
jadefox 5 hours ago [-]
I noted in the intro which LLM's I had used to research and edit with. Mostly because I could not find a simple map of the tooling layers in common lisp in one place so I "synthesised" one of my own. The map is really what I was in search of and AI helped make it so, however the article has been revised and edited a zillion times by me and contains a lot of contributions from the r/lisp community and for some it still has "LLM voice" so I don't know maybe my "voice" has gone LLM too lol.
Anyway if there are any specific corrections or mistakes in the article that need attention I'm always happy to get feedback.
massysett 4 hours ago [-]
Ok, presume it is. Why is this a useful observation? The author still needed to poke and prod the LLM to produce useful information. She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give, and hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.
I’ve used CL for years and the layered model fits with my experience yet I never conceived of it exactly that way. It’s useful. So what if an LLM wrote it?
jadefox 2 hours ago [-]
If it helps, the article “evolved” so I don’t really care that LLM’s had a part to play. I am setting up a development environment for Mezzano, the Common Lisp OS after getting it running on ARM64. I needed to understand the full CL toolchain to build an AI agent harness that could talk to Mezzano.
I figured out I could do this via SWANK. But kept hitting the same problem, the information about how all the pieces fit together is scattered across dozens of sources and nobody as far as I can tell had put a complete layered map in one place. Which I kind of already had from all the conversations and research I’ve been doing so I glommed it all together and posted it to r/lisp.
BTW the lisp community have been really helpful so I incorporated and continue to add all the corrections and pointers people have been giving. Case in point someone above pointed out vend which is an interesting approach that might be useful for my lisp harness project.
HexDecOctBin 1 hours ago [-]
When I read an article, I am expecting to read the author's own experiences and insights they gained from them. Not the regurgitation of an industrial scale word generator.
> She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give
Then publish the prompts. Let me enter them in an LLM of my choosing and see what bullshit it hallucinates and diff it against the 'article'.
> hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.
"Hopefully"? Publishing something a stochastic parrot dreamed up under your name is ghost writing at best and spreading misinformation at worst.
__patchbit__ 43 minutes ago [-]
> something a stochastic parrot dreamed up
With more time and energy, human discovery and invention, the statistical mechanics backing the information digest will improve beyond any one human's lifetime internalization and idiosyncratic writings divined.
HexDecOctBin 36 minutes ago [-]
> will improve
If only I was capable of such divination.
5 hours ago [-]
johnisgood 8 hours ago [-]
> Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 were all used to help research and edit this article
A quick note, Common Lisp tooling documentation exists in a LOT of places, but I could not find a single beginner friendly map of the full development stack, so had a long chat with various LLM's to spin one up. Regardless of your views on this approach to things I hope the article helps some people get a better mental model of what the pieces are and how they fit together. It's helped me wade through a lot of choices and debug a few things.
Thanks for the pointer.
Anyway if there are any specific corrections or mistakes in the article that need attention I'm always happy to get feedback.
I’ve used CL for years and the layered model fits with my experience yet I never conceived of it exactly that way. It’s useful. So what if an LLM wrote it?
I figured out I could do this via SWANK. But kept hitting the same problem, the information about how all the pieces fit together is scattered across dozens of sources and nobody as far as I can tell had put a complete layered map in one place. Which I kind of already had from all the conversations and research I’ve been doing so I glommed it all together and posted it to r/lisp.
BTW the lisp community have been really helpful so I incorporated and continue to add all the corrections and pointers people have been giving. Case in point someone above pointed out vend which is an interesting approach that might be useful for my lisp harness project.
> She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give
Then publish the prompts. Let me enter them in an LLM of my choosing and see what bullshit it hallucinates and diff it against the 'article'.
> hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.
"Hopefully"? Publishing something a stochastic parrot dreamed up under your name is ghost writing at best and spreading misinformation at worst.
With more time and energy, human discovery and invention, the statistical mechanics backing the information digest will improve beyond any one human's lifetime internalization and idiosyncratic writings divined.
If only I was capable of such divination.