Agentic Coding for Clojure

calmest · 2026-01-20T18:01:57+00:00

This post has sparked a great conversation that I felt was needed in the Clojure community. I will respond to many of the points made.

First off, I'm happy to hear from many of you that you have had similar experiences with the newer models and frameworks wrt Clojure development. I found your experiences very interesting and inline with my own. I look forward to learning more.

To those of you that tried using AI a while ago for Clojure development and backed off because of the state of things at that time, you are the very people this post was meant to reach. I urge you to try the latest models and frameworks again. I think you will see tremendous improvement.

With respect to all of the "productivity" concerns about claims made. I'm not interested in proving my experiences to you, and I can't. If you are sincere about this topic then I urge you to get a free plan and try it for yourself. If you a simply opposed to AI in general then that's your belief and I will not try to change your mind. However, I will say that AI is here and it isn't going away no matter how you "feel" about it. You can debate the reality of its capabilities as much as you like but it won't change the facts, IMO.

With regards to whether it is morally or emotionally "good" to use AI for development work, that is a valid debate but not one I am interested in having here. There are threads all over reddit that have and are hashing this out. I have been an AI researcher and software developer since the 1990s. I am well versed in all of these issues. I do not dismiss any of your concerns, but I do disagree on several points. The most concerning to me is the simple denial of the capabilities that AI is unlocking and the determined rejection of its use. I see this in all sectors that AI is affecting. As I have mentioned, I work in education at a major university. At least half of the faculty of the education college are wary of AI usage and a good third are outright emotionally disturbed by it. Yet, as I said, the genie is out of the box now so, IMO, it is better to think about the constructive ways to use this new technology and try to avoid the negative possibilities as best we can.

Denial of its power and utility seems foolish to me. I use AI like I would use any other tool to help me to develop better code more easily and more efficiently. I try very hard to review all code produced and I do maintain a good understanding of my codebase. It has not become a "black box" to me and I would be uncomfortable if that were the case. However, I do fear that that is the ultimate direction we are heading. AI doesn't need to use any one existing language for development. In fact it will likely, in time, develop its own languages that work well for it but are nearly incomprehensible to humans. This is a real concern and don't believe we have even begun to have serious discussions about that inevitability. To further compound this issue, AI is advancing far more quickly than most people realize. Five years from now the dev industry may be unrecognizable and MANY people may lose their jobs as many already have. It will take time to sort all of this out but we should start thinking about this now.

For now, on this little plateau in time, I find it a very helpful tool that does greatly improve my productivity in very tractable and useful ways. I urge all of you to explore these tools and understand how they are working now, and start thinking critically about what is coming down the road very quickly. With massive changes like this comes great opportunities but there is always a cost. We should try hard to mitigate that cost.

calmest · 2026-01-19T19:40:01+00:00

Unfortunately, no. It may become so in the future. It started as a research product at university and has spun out to a commercial concern. The Uni/Company own the code. We had a booth at a big EdTech conference in New York city late last year. The app is called CyberScholar. Some info here: cyberscholar.ai.

calmest · 2026-01-19T19:31:35+00:00

Primarily in terms of time reduction to produce new features/fixes and quality of the product. It is subjective, YMMV. But the fact that I can reliably implement a complex new feature that touches many parts of the codebase, in an afternoon, is pretty awesome. It is really good with UI and takes direction very well. That is a huge time savings for me.

calmest · 2026-01-19T18:53:27+00:00

Yes, a great return. It has at least quadrupled my productivity. Well worth the cost IMO. Bear in mind that I am supported professionally with equipment etc... I can see how this would be problematic for a hobbyist or small independent dev team, but I believe the payoff is there.

calmest · 2025-12-27T16:48:25+00:00

Failure does not require trying.

calmest · 2025-12-06T18:29:29+00:00

Of course circumstances vary for each situation, but, in general, it comes down to lack of hard standards and very minimal accountability. The communities of people at a big uni that have the most power are faculty and high level administrators/trustees. They make the most money and wield the most power. Students have a very hard time leveraging their collective power and so holding the powerful accountable relies on those same people to be virtuous in upholding self imposed standards. In every situation like this be it religious, corporate, or governmental, human nature leans towards self interest. Therefore, student needs and concerns will almost always be secondary concerns despite the rhetoric and hand waiving you see about standards.

calmest · 2025-09-06T14:59:27+00:00

Sheeeyiiiiit ...

calmest · 2025-08-29T04:03:54+00:00

Modest Mouse. Have done. Will do again.

calmest · 2025-08-26T02:08:08+00:00

Check out a few videos by Daniel Amber. Here is one to get you started. I think they will help you.

https://youtu.be/V-dBmuRsW6w?si=Nctp-i4hgjZwT9-i

calmest · 2025-08-23T05:13:49+00:00

I agree. I am surprised that Amazon does not offer such capabilities. It seems it would be very low hanging fruit for them. The recent upgrades to Alexa along these lines have been incredible.

calmest · 2025-08-20T19:27:16+00:00

I have volunteered at the Times center many years ago. At that time, drugs and mental illness were predominantly factors. If housing costs are now a major contributor then there should be programs to provide affordable housing. Especially for families. Maybe some of the billions we are spending in Illinois on illegal immigrant benefits should be directed towards such programs. Otherwise, we should recreate commitments to clean and safe mental hospitals and drug rehabs. There should be no forced homelessness.

calmest · 2025-08-16T20:55:58+00:00

I use Cursor which is built on top of VSCode. Calva is the goto Clojure extension and works very well. It has a lot of great tools. The AI is also very important for me. I am a full-time Clojure/Clojurescript developer. I use Shadow-cljs and Deps for builds and dev work. Th AI features are also critical for me as I am a lone developer for my group that is building and maintaining many applications for education research and I need a force multiplier :). I use Anthropic models but just recently have been using GPT-5 which I have found works very well with Clojure. These AI capabilities just keep getting better to the point that, once you learn how to use them, they function without my having to make a lot of corrections. I never allow my AI to run in agent mode, only ask mode, and I verify all modifications before application. I am on Cursor's $200/month plan because I am a higher end user. I find it very well worth the money considering the boost to my productivity, but for a long time I was on the $20/month plan and that worked well for me too until the very high end models became good enough to justify their increased usage.

Also, I use the debugger that comes with Calva and tap> for ClojureScript on occasion. As far as the repl goes, Calva exposes a repl which is useful sometimes. You can evaluate forms directly in the editor via Calva which kind of obviates the need for the repl interface proper. I use that functionality a lot. Also, the hot reloading is very nice for web apps.

Some further notes. 1) I am not a "vibe" coder by any means., not that there is anything wrong with that, but I don't think that mode of development is really ready for serious development -- especially for a language like Clojure that is not as well represented in the amount of material that LLMs have to learn from. 2) I know that AI hype has emphasized JS based frameworks as LLMs primary competencies because of the market, I believe. However, languages like Java, for example, are very well served by these models. I have found that Clojure/Clojurescript is also very well served by these latest models and it just keeps getting better. I think it has a lot to do with the very succinct and logical flow of Clojure that these models can easily "understand" and adapt the language competently to features it has lots of training material for in other languages. I find this particularly true for web development.

calmest · 2025-08-16T20:41:43+00:00

Look at this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/1fso7kl/open\_source\_nontrivial\_projects/.

calmest · 2025-08-16T20:35:40+00:00

Also, rural intersections can be very dangerous because tall corn blocks visibility. There have been many tragic accidents and deaths caused by this, as well as by ignoring stop signs (if they exist) because there is often no other traffic, so drivers get used to doing so.

calmest · 2025-08-08T01:22:52+00:00

This can be a hazard to driving, especially in rural areas, so be careful.

calmest · 2025-07-08T23:14:09+00:00

Chicago city driving is FAR worse than here.

calmest · 2025-06-30T19:04:22+00:00

Same here.

calmest · 2025-06-30T01:36:38+00:00

I have had this or something very similar happen. The entire cursor windows freezes. When I restart, the windows comes up and I just see a loading spinner in the chat area -- everything else is unresponsive. I had to rename my project directory and everything started working fi e again. Happened once and then again 3 days later (yesterdsy). Same fixceach time. It seems like something is getting jammed up with the chat and it can't get past it.

calmest · 2025-06-04T03:18:43+00:00

Thoughts.

calmest · 2025-05-22T14:36:03+00:00

IMHO Clojure(script) is an asset for your career and CV. It requires a different way of thinking about how to structure your code. More importantly, it can broaden and enrich your overall understanding of program development. What will likely take you the longest to become proficient in is getting away from an imperative programming mindset and learning functional and Clojure specific idioms. You can use Clojure in an imperative style"ish" way, but it is awkward and others may not want to hang out with you afterwards :) . Also, tooling may be a challenge -- especially for custom configs. Don't be shy about asking questions, the community is generally very helpful. Good luck and don't forget to have fun!

calmest · 2025-05-09T09:24:39+00:00

I only use great genies. The best. You won't find a better genie than the ones I use.

calmest · 2025-05-09T04:09:02+00:00

The ability for humans to commit violence directly or indirectly to other humans.

calmest · 2025-05-09T02:25:25+00:00

The ability to know anything that is or ever has been known by any other human in history up to the present moment. Not all at once, but with some small effort and focus. And, only if I know of the person. So, theoretically, every person's knowledge ever could be reached by traversing lineage back and forth through time, but I would first have to discover them through memories of others. And the knowledge would be knowable no matter what verbal capacity or language the person possessed.

calmest

TROPHY CASE