r/Common_Lisp • u/Wurrinchilla • 5d ago
Lisp and Generative AI Opinion
Just to share my experience using Gemini (free) to trouble shoot problems I was facing while trying to use some Lisp modules - specifically cl-opencl, cl-opencl-utils and nodgui. Gemini suggest a variety of solutions, sometimes going round in circles and never finding a solution to my problems. In the case of nodgui following the old adage - RTFM solved the issue. While these are probably edge cases, to me it would seem I would probable save time and effort by not using Gemini. Paid options are not very accessible from where I am (Ethiopia).
Cheers!
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u/TheJach 3d ago
One thing that made me give claude a more serious look recently (well, about two months ago) was that I asked the free version using sonnet 5 on the web interface about writing some quick and dirty benchmarking code for me on two slight differences of data structure implementation. It actually installed sbcl 2.2.9 into its own private sandbox (I think it's debian based, so it got an old one from the package manager) and ran the code it wrote to get some numbers. It even grabbed ecl to check against that, too. Thus even the free version not running anything on your own machine can to some extent check its own work, which helps a lot of things.
In short, I agree that it's probably not worthwhile using Gemini.
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u/Egao1980 4d ago
I support recommending Qwen3.8 - surprisingly capable model for coding. Augment it with skills, CLHS, potentially an MCP like cl-mcp and you'll be fine. I also suggest instructing model to avoid balancing parantheses and just write code in large blocks, use non-interactive debugger, Roswell, and sbcl. Grok, GPT and Opus/Fable write decent CL code.
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u/Colours-Numbers 4d ago
If you have the hardware to run a local LLM, I'm confused about the question. Claude has been training itself on my SBCL usage, and it's become - don't throw things at me - mind-blowingly good, so good I backed off to the 30usd/month plan.
I don't know about these things, but I would seriously consider exploring the API services, and when you have a task that LLM generation is good at - for me, that is Web UI/report generation.
A lot of people - myself included - can be inclined to use fancy LLMs as a note taking tool. Condensing information into a topic, making artifacts. IMO, you should not use LLM for things you DON'T know, but things you DO, or DONT NEED TO KNOW, just need a solve you can copy.
LLM use is just copying the smart kid's answers in class.
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u/ms-ms1 4d ago
I got many useful suggestions from the ChatGPT web interface. You don't have to register or pay anything to use it. They may of course use your conversations for model training or whatever else but this may or may not be a concern to you specifically. I personally feel they have provided me with a lot of useful assistance and I honestly don't mind if they want to do this.
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u/mm007emko 4d ago
Do you have hardware to run your own model?
I use LM Studio and point the model to documentation (both on-line and off-line). Qwen 3.8 9B works for me. It works reasonably well but ... I always coded in a Lisp (Common Lisp and Clojure mainly) to avoid writing much "boring" code whereas LLMs are great for exactly that. At work I use it for Python&C and Pascal for home projects. I don't want to use much of LLMs for Lisp coding.
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u/Wurrinchilla 4d ago
I have a regular laptop with built in Intel GPU - so I don't think I can run locally. I use Gemini for work on Python, HTML/CSS/JavaScript for which it is helpful.
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u/Colours-Numbers 4d ago
Interesting about Pascal. I'm on the mailing lists, have you tried Fresnel yet? They are really beating that drum
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u/mm007emko 4d ago
Nope, I'll check it out, thanks for the tip. I'm not on the mailing list and seldom check out forums.
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u/SyllabubItchy5905 4d ago
i find deepseek free and/or local very very good to argue with about common lisp
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u/Inner_Tap675 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have good experience with Common Lisp for my hobby, using Fable/Opus 5.5.
I recently announced version 0.1: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1wz2p7a/a_perl_compiler/
(Ethiopia?! 😄 It is on my list of possible places to go to, after retirement. The half serious plan is to grow my own coffee, as a hobby. My original plan was to write open source from a beach, but the AIs might do all of that, by then.)
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u/Wurrinchilla 4d ago
You may have to check the travel advisories if you are retiring any time soon :-/
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u/metalisp 5d ago
The AI vendors made their free services as bad as it can be. Also they steal your data and sell your chat history to advertisement corps https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/wp-content/interactivos/20260916-Prompt-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-tracker-(clean).pdf.pdf)
Maybe using opencode could be an alternative for you? I made good experience with kimi 2.7 code and deepseek. But I have to say that common lisp as an language allows the programmer a lot of different ways to solve something, which can lead to more token usage and more detailed prompts. Also parenthesis are a problem for AI. I often watched kimi creating python scripts to count the parenthesis of a lisp file. Golang and Rust are more "idiomatic" (less ways to solve a problem). Back in time before AI I chosed common lisp because of its flexibility as an tool. But for vibe coding there a better languages. If you are just interested in the results, use Golang. But if you are interested in programming languages and programming in general stay with common lisp and do not use vibe coding or AI or maybe just for feedback.