4 ms·

> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop

> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. 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. LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test things, I even made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just simply run it, but to actually play it without losing. It was insane. Also, Emacs is all about plain text - you can easily extract text from anything - from the browser, terminal, CLI apps, Slack, Jira, etc., and you can do that on your own terms - context can appear in a buffer, in your clipboard, become a file or series of API requests. That is really hard to beat.

mimischi 6mo ago
Can you describe your setup on how you use LLMs within Emacs?
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Of course. I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good. I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved. I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it. All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config². Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples? — ¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions ² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai
  - pandakar 6mo ago
    This is good stuff :) Honestly, I am having a lot of fun just using org mode files as prompts and eventually output for a Claude Code instance in vterm. All these files get saved with the output and magit is of course amazing, just good affordances and history keeping.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      (setopt gptel-default-mode 'org-mode) For persistence: https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ai/autoload/gptel.el#L360 https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ai...
  - zingar 6mo ago
    I’d like a concrete example on how you’re actually controlling emacs with LLMs. Is ECA the part that does that?
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      gptel has the built-in elisp eval tool. ECA doesn't have it built-in, I use my custom MCP (I posted the link in the comment above).
imoverclocked 6mo ago
> LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance ... > you can easily extract text from anything This is what gives me the most pause.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Care to explain? Why is it? You think it's dangerous or some other reasons?
  - Blackthorn 6mo ago
    Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      So? My terminal has the same full system access. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be using Claude code in it. It's contained locally on my computer, I don't see any problem here. I use Emacs like my OS-layer. Why would I complain that my OS has access to something? It would be weird and annoying if it's the opposite.
      - Blackthorn 6mo ago
        You have to give Claude Code access to every shell command individually unless you run in yolo mode.
      - forty 6mo ago
        I don't think it's very reasonable to use claude code on a computer that have credentials without some kind of sandboxing or validing every command it does, at which point I'd rather do things manually
      - habinero 6mo ago
        Yeah, that's incredibly unsafe. You made a footgun machine and you're firing it with no shoes on. Don't run that on any machine with credentials you care about. At the very least, run it in Docker. It's not a security tool, but it's at least some kind of guardrail against data loss and exfiltration.
spudlyo 6mo ago
I am really loving working on a fun Elisp project with pi, a minimal and very extensible agent. I have the agent use emacsclient to control my session, showing me code, running magit ediff for me, testing, formatting, reloading -- it's all working great. I'm still exploring all the ways the agent and I can collaborate using Emacs as a shared medium, but at the moment am super optimistic about it.
mark_l_watson 6mo ago
Same for me! My .emacs config has improved and I wrote my own Emacs based coding agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent
devin 6mo ago
Big same. I have been doing a lot of clojure development, and hooking up my app to a live REPL has given me an absolutely fantastic feedback loop for the LLM. I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  > I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing Very true. There's an enormous tacit knowledge gap. Check this out: I have to use Mac for work. My WM is Yabai, which is controlled via Hammerspoon (great tool on its own), which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have a Lisp REPL. MCP connected to that REPL can query and inspect every single window I have on my screen. It can move them around, it can resize them, it can extract some properties of them. It's figuring out stuff like: "pick a selected Slack thread from the app and send it into an Emacs buffer", or "make my app windows work like Emacs buffers" - pick from the list and swap it in place. Or "find the HN thread about retiring from Emacs among my browser tabs and summarize the content"... Never in my life have I been more grateful to my younger self for grokking the philosophy of Lisp. Recent months have only reinforced my firm belief that this 70-year-old tech is truly everlasting. Thank you, John McCarthy, for the great gift to humanity, even though so weirdly underappreciated.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    Ah, that's on Mac, but I forgot to tell you about the Linux. On Linux, I ran my modal-keyboard-toolkit controlled through babashka (clojure) with an exposed nREPL endpoint. That means I can query and control windows - their placement, change brightness and color temp. - all interactively, directly from my editor. I can write some conditional event loop, e.g., time-based color temp changes. Because I have a Lisp REPL - I can test out all the colors, squeezing the entire day into a minute - simulate, eval and preview the results - no saving, no reloading, no recompilation. Once satisfied - I can put the time markers accordingly - so colors change depending on the time of day.
  - uint32_t 6mo ago
    This is very interesting! I've played around with Hammerspoon for a bit but nowhere near this level. Do you have a link to your config or could you give me a bit more detail on your setup?
minikomi 6mo ago
Asolutely. It doesn't have to be an either-or. I use gptel and org mode when I was to be really hands on driving the development. It's a very different mode of interacting with models, and the way newer models are trained to play nice with harnesses makes them very obedient. https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/
- mncharity 6mo ago
  Interesting. Tnx. In case anyone else wondered about using gptel to edit thinking (eg vis Qwen3.6's `preserve thinking`), [1] explains: > In a multi-turn request, from the time you run `gptel-send`, everything the LLM sends is passed back to it [...during tool calls...] includes multiple reasoning blocks. [...But...] subsequent gptel-send calls read their input from the buffer contents (or active region, etc), so the reasoning blocks in the buffer will not [] be sent as "reasoning_content". But in org mode, those are apparently `#+being_reasoning` blocks (`gptel-include-reasoning`?), so editable thought might be an easy addition? A caution, fwiw, that any llms which respond with interleaved content and reasoning blocks, currently only work when not streaming, and fixing that is non-trivial.[also 1] [1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel/issues/1282 https://github.com/karthink/gptel/issues/1282
- kqr 6mo ago
  Is this your site? I cannot find an RSS feed for it. I'd like to subscribe.
  - minikomi 6mo ago
    Cheers mate I added one at https://poyo.co/feed.xml https://poyo.co/feed.xml
ww520 6mo ago
Same here. Emacs has been the stable editor for all kinds of language changes, tool changes, and IDE changes. Emacs is great with LLM, as LLM is mostly text related and Emacs is great in capturing and dealing with text.
0x20cowboy 6mo ago
So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Can't agree more. Lisp was discovered/invented for the purpose of AI research. Of course, modern neural nets and transformers is a big departure from McCarthy's vision of AI - logical, interpretable, symbolic. However, if the current wave of AI hits a wall - and many serious researchers think it will, or already has at the margins - there's growing interest in neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural nets with symbolic reasoning. That's closer to McCarthy's original vision, and Lisps are genuinely well-suited for it. Let's be honest: Lisp probably won't ever get bigger than Python, unless Python for whatever reason starts dying on its own. But if AI ever gets serious about interpretability, formal reasoning, program synthesis - all the stuff Lisp was built for - it just might quietly become relevant again in research contexts, without ever reclaiming mainstream status. Scicloj has been building out a serious ML stack in Clojure - noj, metamorph.ml, scicloj.ml.tribuo, libpython-clj for Python interop. Beside that, people been proving that 'code is data' is exactly what makes it a better target for LLMs. Clojure is most token efficient PL - it's been proven. There are some recent interesting clj projects in relevance: — https://github.com/realgenekim/clj-surgeon https://github.com/realgenekim/clj-surgeon https://clojure.getpando.ai https://clojure.getpando.ai https://github.com/yogthos/chiasmus https://github.com/yogthos/chiasmus
  - piokoch 6mo ago
    Well, this is because "normal" programming languages are one step above AST. So LLM has to work with program text, which is much easier than regular human text, as it is constrained to well defined number of keywords and grammar, but still this is pretty variable. Lisp is just AST, so it is one level lower. I guess that at some point LLM-s will stop writing human-readable code, as this is additional obstacle, they will work directly with binaries or virtual machines code (like in Java), because this will be easier and eat less tokens.
    - 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

mimischi 6mo ago

Can you describe your setup on how you use LLMs within Emacs?

iLemming 6mo ago
Of course. I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good. I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved. I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it. All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config². Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples? — ¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions ² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai
- pandakar 6mo ago
  This is good stuff :) Honestly, I am having a lot of fun just using org mode files as prompts and eventually output for a Claude Code instance in vterm. All these files get saved with the output and magit is of course amazing, just good affordances and history keeping.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    (setopt gptel-default-mode 'org-mode) For persistence: https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ai/autoload/gptel.el#L360 https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ai...
- zingar 6mo ago
  I’d like a concrete example on how you’re actually controlling emacs with LLMs. Is ECA the part that does that?
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    gptel has the built-in elisp eval tool. ECA doesn't have it built-in, I use my custom MCP (I posted the link in the comment above).

imoverclocked 6mo ago

> LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance ... > you can easily extract text from anything This is what gives me the most pause.

iLemming 6mo ago
Care to explain? Why is it? You think it's dangerous or some other reasons?
- Blackthorn 6mo ago
  Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    So? My terminal has the same full system access. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be using Claude code in it. It's contained locally on my computer, I don't see any problem here. I use Emacs like my OS-layer. Why would I complain that my OS has access to something? It would be weird and annoying if it's the opposite.
    - Blackthorn 6mo ago
      You have to give Claude Code access to every shell command individually unless you run in yolo mode.
    - forty 6mo ago
      I don't think it's very reasonable to use claude code on a computer that have credentials without some kind of sandboxing or validing every command it does, at which point I'd rather do things manually
    - habinero 6mo ago
      Yeah, that's incredibly unsafe. You made a footgun machine and you're firing it with no shoes on. Don't run that on any machine with credentials you care about. At the very least, run it in Docker. It's not a security tool, but it's at least some kind of guardrail against data loss and exfiltration.

spudlyo 6mo ago

I am really loving working on a fun Elisp project with pi, a minimal and very extensible agent. I have the agent use emacsclient to control my session, showing me code, running magit ediff for me, testing, formatting, reloading -- it's all working great. I'm still exploring all the ways the agent and I can collaborate using Emacs as a shared medium, but at the moment am super optimistic about it.

mark_l_watson 6mo ago

Same for me! My .emacs config has improved and I wrote my own Emacs based coding agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent https://github.com/mark-watson/coding-agent

devin 6mo ago

Big same. I have been doing a lot of clojure development, and hooking up my app to a live REPL has given me an absolutely fantastic feedback loop for the LLM. I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing.

iLemming 6mo ago
> I don't think a lot of people understand what they're missing Very true. There's an enormous tacit knowledge gap. Check this out: I have to use Mac for work. My WM is Yabai, which is controlled via Hammerspoon (great tool on its own), which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have a Lisp REPL. MCP connected to that REPL can query and inspect every single window I have on my screen. It can move them around, it can resize them, it can extract some properties of them. It's figuring out stuff like: "pick a selected Slack thread from the app and send it into an Emacs buffer", or "make my app windows work like Emacs buffers" - pick from the list and swap it in place. Or "find the HN thread about retiring from Emacs among my browser tabs and summarize the content"... Never in my life have I been more grateful to my younger self for grokking the philosophy of Lisp. Recent months have only reinforced my firm belief that this 70-year-old tech is truly everlasting. Thank you, John McCarthy, for the great gift to humanity, even though so weirdly underappreciated.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Ah, that's on Mac, but I forgot to tell you about the Linux. On Linux, I ran my modal-keyboard-toolkit controlled through babashka (clojure) with an exposed nREPL endpoint. That means I can query and control windows - their placement, change brightness and color temp. - all interactively, directly from my editor. I can write some conditional event loop, e.g., time-based color temp changes. Because I have a Lisp REPL - I can test out all the colors, squeezing the entire day into a minute - simulate, eval and preview the results - no saving, no reloading, no recompilation. Once satisfied - I can put the time markers accordingly - so colors change depending on the time of day.
- uint32_t 6mo ago
  This is very interesting! I've played around with Hammerspoon for a bit but nowhere near this level. Do you have a link to your config or could you give me a bit more detail on your setup?

minikomi 6mo ago

Asolutely. It doesn't have to be an either-or. I use gptel and org mode when I was to be really hands on driving the development. It's a very different mode of interacting with models, and the way newer models are trained to play nice with harnesses makes them very obedient. https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/

mncharity 6mo ago
Interesting. Tnx. In case anyone else wondered about using gptel to edit thinking (eg vis Qwen3.6's `preserve thinking`), [1] explains: > In a multi-turn request, from the time you run `gptel-send`, everything the LLM sends is passed back to it [...during tool calls...] includes multiple reasoning blocks. [...But...] subsequent gptel-send calls read their input from the buffer contents (or active region, etc), so the reasoning blocks in the buffer will not [] be sent as "reasoning_content". But in org mode, those are apparently `#+being_reasoning` blocks (`gptel-include-reasoning`?), so editable thought might be an easy addition? A caution, fwiw, that any llms which respond with interleaved content and reasoning blocks, currently only work when not streaming, and fixing that is non-trivial.[also 1] [1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel/issues/1282 https://github.com/karthink/gptel/issues/1282
kqr 6mo ago
Is this your site? I cannot find an RSS feed for it. I'd like to subscribe.
- minikomi 6mo ago
  Cheers mate I added one at https://poyo.co/feed.xml https://poyo.co/feed.xml

ww520 6mo ago

Same here. Emacs has been the stable editor for all kinds of language changes, tool changes, and IDE changes. Emacs is great with LLM, as LLM is mostly text related and Emacs is great in capturing and dealing with text.

0x20cowboy 6mo ago

So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.

iLemming 6mo ago
Can't agree more. Lisp was discovered/invented for the purpose of AI research. Of course, modern neural nets and transformers is a big departure from McCarthy's vision of AI - logical, interpretable, symbolic. However, if the current wave of AI hits a wall - and many serious researchers think it will, or already has at the margins - there's growing interest in neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural nets with symbolic reasoning. That's closer to McCarthy's original vision, and Lisps are genuinely well-suited for it. Let's be honest: Lisp probably won't ever get bigger than Python, unless Python for whatever reason starts dying on its own. But if AI ever gets serious about interpretability, formal reasoning, program synthesis - all the stuff Lisp was built for - it just might quietly become relevant again in research contexts, without ever reclaiming mainstream status. Scicloj has been building out a serious ML stack in Clojure - noj, metamorph.ml, scicloj.ml.tribuo, libpython-clj for Python interop. Beside that, people been proving that 'code is data' is exactly what makes it a better target for LLMs. Clojure is most token efficient PL - it's been proven. There are some recent interesting clj projects in relevance: — https://github.com/realgenekim/clj-surgeon https://github.com/realgenekim/clj-surgeon https://clojure.getpando.ai https://clojure.getpando.ai https://github.com/yogthos/chiasmus https://github.com/yogthos/chiasmus
- piokoch 6mo ago
  Well, this is because "normal" programming languages are one step above AST. So LLM has to work with program text, which is much easier than regular human text, as it is constrained to well defined number of keywords and grammar, but still this is pretty variable. Lisp is just AST, so it is one level lower. I guess that at some point LLM-s will stop writing human-readable code, as this is additional obstacle, they will work directly with binaries or virtual machines code (like in Java), because this will be easier and eat less tokens.
  - 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]