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magnusi 54 minutes ago [-]
Hello guys, I am the author of Autolith (github.com/luciusmagn), I am pretty new to Hacker News. I will respond to your posts as soon as I can :)
a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago [-]
Given that the most important feature for agent performance is the popularity of the language, ie, the amount of training data, (https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/), why would you cause problems for yourself by using Lisp rather than Python/Javascript if you care mainly about results fast, or C/C++/Rust if you care about performance too?
wild_egg 4 hours ago [-]
LLMs have been solid at writing Common Lisp since Sonnet 3.5 and have been near flawless since the Opus 4.5 release.
The niche language thing is really not a problem at all any more. If you're working in some esolang it doesn't take more than a 1-2k token primer in the context to get great results, and lisp is popular enough to not even need that.
The benefit of having the agent directly in the image like with Autolith here is that it can directly inspect all defined symbols and explore and orient itself automatically. Really doesn't need much guidance to get great results.
jbott 5 hours ago [-]
> the most important feature for agent performance is the popularity of the language
This is explicitly called out as only weakly supported in that blog post:
- You should use a popular language
- There's weak support for this statement
a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago [-]
Feel free to do your own analysis -- my informal experiments backs this up, though. I see worse results when I try to do anything in an unpopular language.
It makes sense, needing to train the model on things that aren't already in its weighs takes up valuable context. Until we have models that update their weights based on what they've seen in their recent sessions and learn like people, this will be a problem.
For now, though, between the results I'm seeing here, and the lack of need to look at code, I think this kills off any reason for me to use less popular languages.
jauntywundrkind 5 hours ago [-]
Your attempt was probably pretty, ahem, weak. How much support would you say you gave your goes, before you threw in the towel?
I don't think there's really ever a downside to leaning in and making use of a language or system that works for you. Trying to tell people they should just use the popular thing is, imo, bad advice to turn hackers and experimenters into boring people.
a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago [-]
A day or so for each of the oddball languages; again, I'm still waiting for an argument on why there's any value here, since the entire point of an agentic system like this is that I don't have to read the code. Experiment with the AI, sure, but you've got a pretty high burden of proof to show that AI is going to pick it up without a high per-prompt token cost.
AI changes the constraints here for now, since it can't permanently learn things. I'm waiting until that changes, but right now it's better to use what it knows out of the box if you want good results.
A better language doesn't buy me anything other than performance; the reason to stick an AI in here is to remove interactions with the code. I don't care what the AI chooses to use, as long as it gets results.
wild_egg 4 hours ago [-]
In this case, the better language buys you increased iteration speed in addition to performance, and that is worth a lot.
a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago [-]
Why? I'm giving the system the same prompts either way.
rdb_ 3 hours ago [-]
is it that llms write "better" typescript than let's say elixir because it has seen more of it..? or is it that you're relying on something like effect-ts to keep llms from tripping over even small things?
coincidentally, "good code" in popular lang is rarely directly attributed to only that part; and it's also about the underlying principles it tries to follow in the code... another example; is it typescript that's good, or are "types" inherently making things/feedback loops easier to reason about in llms? (only using ts here for all example because it's probably one of the most "trained on" pl)
yogthos 4 hours ago [-]
The obvious reason is that Lisp is perfectly suited for writing self modifying programs in a way pretty much no other language is. And as others pointed out, the evidence that agents work better with other languages is pretty thin. I've been using Claude, GLM, and DeepSeek with Clojure for around a year now, and they certainly do just fine in my experience.
In fact, I've had much easier time maintaining LLM assisted programs in Scheme and Clojure than other languages I've tried using because functional style naturally leads to low coupling. And that makes controlling context far easier than the rats nest of shared state that you have in imperative languages.
armitron 3 hours ago [-]
This is not just false but egregiously wrong. The regular syntax of Lisp is a tremendous asset when it comes to LLMs being able to work directly in the image. If I had to score languages by how well they work with current LLMs, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp would be at the very top.
rufius 6 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting idea. I was thinking about something similar in Smalltalk or Erlang the other day. Mostly building on the actor/object+mailbox concept.
I didn’t actually do anything with that idea yet but may look at the idea in Elixir this weekend.
vivzkestrel 2 hours ago [-]
stupid question: why are so many people obsessed with LISP?
The niche language thing is really not a problem at all any more. If you're working in some esolang it doesn't take more than a 1-2k token primer in the context to get great results, and lisp is popular enough to not even need that.
The benefit of having the agent directly in the image like with Autolith here is that it can directly inspect all defined symbols and explore and orient itself automatically. Really doesn't need much guidance to get great results.
This is explicitly called out as only weakly supported in that blog post:
It makes sense, needing to train the model on things that aren't already in its weighs takes up valuable context. Until we have models that update their weights based on what they've seen in their recent sessions and learn like people, this will be a problem.
For now, though, between the results I'm seeing here, and the lack of need to look at code, I think this kills off any reason for me to use less popular languages.
I don't think there's really ever a downside to leaning in and making use of a language or system that works for you. Trying to tell people they should just use the popular thing is, imo, bad advice to turn hackers and experimenters into boring people.
AI changes the constraints here for now, since it can't permanently learn things. I'm waiting until that changes, but right now it's better to use what it knows out of the box if you want good results.
A better language doesn't buy me anything other than performance; the reason to stick an AI in here is to remove interactions with the code. I don't care what the AI chooses to use, as long as it gets results.
coincidentally, "good code" in popular lang is rarely directly attributed to only that part; and it's also about the underlying principles it tries to follow in the code... another example; is it typescript that's good, or are "types" inherently making things/feedback loops easier to reason about in llms? (only using ts here for all example because it's probably one of the most "trained on" pl)
In fact, I've had much easier time maintaining LLM assisted programs in Scheme and Clojure than other languages I've tried using because functional style naturally leads to low coupling. And that makes controlling context far easier than the rats nest of shared state that you have in imperative languages.
I didn’t actually do anything with that idea yet but may look at the idea in Elixir this weekend.