[pama]

The blog is about writing an agent when you dont already have an agent, but only a plain LLM. It stitches the minimal pieces together. Agents dont need lots of supporting infra, so it is good to keep the code concise. Not a wow moment for sure, though some people think that agents and harnesses are complicated.

[jstanley]

Right but given that the agent only outputs text, and agents are perfectly happy writing python, the supposed benefit of Lisp is completely irrelevant here.

[embedding-shape]

> the supposed benefit of Lisp is completely irrelevant here

Yeah, it's a small example (it's in the title, "100 lines") so obviously doesn't highlight the best benefits once you reach larger codebase size.

Still think ~8 lines for the core loop is probably more elegant, readable and concise than you can achieve in other algol/C-like languages, but happy to be shown that I'm wrong :)

[hnlmorg]

Most of the code in agents is to handle unhappy paths and human friendly interfaces. I’m sure you could trim most languages core loop too if you discarded all the stuff that actually make agents peasant to use.

[embedding-shape]

Please do show the equivalent of those ~8 lines in the other languages you think of so we can explicitly compare :) I gave it a try in the other languages I know, the Clojure one I have still ends up the smallest and fastest to comprehend.

[hnlmorg]

But that’s not just 8 lines. If I were to try and run those 8 lines on their own then the compiler would fail because half of those functions are undefined. Even the article itself doesn’t claim the agent is only 8 lines long.

And once you start including the boilerplate code you end up with something that’s a lot more equivalent to the other languages you tried.

I love functional languages, and LISP specifically too. But the point of that article wasn’t even to say “LISP is better at code golfing than other languages”. so this doubling down on the SLOC that you’re doing isn’t even a relevant tangent.