[IBCNU]

AI augmented Repl driven dev has got me back into Clojure and it's been changing my life (full on JVM nerd: Kotlin mostly on the backend).

The syntax is the best in the world (how computer's really operate?) but it's always been a pain to setup the tooling for me. I'm dumb like that. Now with AI it's become super easy to get back into the REPL and I'm in heaven.

Totally moving it back into workflow and proposing to bring it back into the dayjob.

[packetlost]

> how computer's really operate?

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but Clojure syntax is not really anywhere close to how computers actually process instructions.

Clojure is very nice though.

[iLemming]

That's not what they meant. Lisp/Clojure syntax (s-expressions, code-as-data, functions as first-class values) maps closely to the theoretical foundations of computation - lambda calculus, which is arguably the mathematical essence of what computation is.

[nmil]

May I ask what your workflow actually looks like? There's been a fair bit of clojureposting over the last few days, and I've decided to jump in and learn.

I love the idea of an AI integrated repl (like what Jeremy Howard and team have done with solveit), it's far more in line with my preferred vision of the AI augmented future of coding. Less "swarm of agent" more, "learn with the agent".

[IBCNU]

Sure!

Setup is:

- nvim --listen /tmp/nvim — starts Neovim with a socket Claude can connect to

- /mcp in Claude Code — enables the Neovim MCP server, gives Claude direct control of Neovim

- lein repl in the nvim terminal

- Claude reads .nrepl-port, runs :ConjureConnect — REPL is live!

The loop is so dope:

- Claude writes code directly into my .clj files

- Then evals it into the running process via Conjure

- Sees the result in the REPL, iterates if wrong, all in the same conversation turn

- wrap-reload middleware means the web server hot-reloads changed namespaces on the next request

[zingar]

Hmmmm… seeing this workflow makes me wonder if I can do this with Ruby (the integration between agent and repl)

[embedding-shape]

Absolutely, spin up a TCP server in Ruby, make it run `eval` on what it receives and tell the agent how to call it with netcat or whatever, works like a charm :)

[iLemming]

> I've decided to jump in and learn.

https://clojure.org/news/2026/03/30/zero_to_repl

[IBCNU]

Also I love your take.

Feel like a holy grail to me to back in the hot seat with repl driven but I can drop in and figure things out... all on the JVM. Madness!