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by goatlover 232 days ago
How many people are using LLMs to replace coding in Lisp? What code are these former Lispers producing with LLM Agents?

I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think LLMs were created as some replacement for Lisp. I don't think they've replaced any programming language, but they do help quite a bit with autogeneration of Python & Javascript in particular.

3 comments

I've been having a great time generating Common Lisp code with LLMs. eg. https://github.com/atgreen/cl-tuition , https://github.com/atgreen/ctfg , etc.
Pull request incoming to add back your missing README emojis.
LLMs seem better suited to help with the Tower of Babel we've created for ourselves: aws commands, Terraform modules, Java libraries, Javascript/React, obscure shell commands, etc.
The strength of Lisps is in ability to define DSLs and then concisely express solutions for problems in that domain. Arguably no other programming language was able to exceed or even match that power until now.

The math behind transformers is deterministic, so LLMs could be treated as compilers (putting aside intentionally adding temperature and non-determinism due to current internal GPU scheduling). In the future I imagine we could be able to declare a dependency on a model, hash its weights in a lockfile and the prompt/spec itself will be the code, which corresponds to that insight.

> the prompt/spec itself will be the code, which corresponds to that insight.

What I've understood from discussions on HN is that LLMs are non-deterministic. Am I right? So the same prompt when executed again could produce a different answer, a different program every time.

That would mean the prompt is not a great 'highleve lanaguage", it would get compiled into a different Lisp-program depending on the time of the day?

Non-determinism is just a limitation of current implementations, but it is not a fundamental property: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...