Presented at the SciCloj visual-tools meeting no. 32 (more at clojureverse).

Mine is a complete contrast to the one by m'friend, colleague, Clojure nerd, and all-round mensch, Kapil Reddy.

• First, Kapil (begins at ~15m 50s): How he LLMs / MCPs with ClojureScript and Clojure.
• Next, I (begins at ~46m 50s): Keeping it Old-Tool: REPL habits of a grug-brained Clojurist.

nb. Somewhat biased toward JVM Clojure, which I use.

• Build a core muscle memory of manipulating the live Clojure runtime that does not depend on any editor or third-party tool.
• Lean on the Clojure standard library as much as possible, especially for namespaces, clojure.pprint, clojure.repl, clojure.reflect, clojure.datafy.
• Prefer using the out-of-the-box deps and cli and build tools, even though they pose a more effortful learning curve than, say, Leiningen.
• Compose a notebook on top of your workflow, like Clerk or Clay or Gorilla REPL, or Calva's Clojure Notebooks feature. Or my all-time ultimate favourite, org-mode with org-babel.
• Port and use this dynamic workflow to other (not-Clojure) contexts, e.g. orchestrating multiple LLMs using structured prompting techniques. For more about that see what m'colleague Kapil is doing (same video), and listen to the discussion. That's above my pay grade.

… which is just a plain old org-mode file that you will see being used to deliver the live-coded demo, which I've rendered into this blog post.

whoami

• walking paradox of mechanical sympathy
  • rapidly becoming obsolete
• severely allergic to dependencies
• half a slot of working memory
  • have to write to think
  • unable to LLM, smol brain no handle big context
• "Writing for nerds" (on a hammock) >> "Vibe coding for nerds"

whereami

Polyglot notebook FTW (sales pitch for org-mode :)

(ns user
  (:require [ring.adapter.jetty :as jetty])
  (:gen-class))

(defn echo-handler [request]
  {:status 200
   :headers {"Content-Type" "text/html;charset=utf-8"}
   :body (pr-str request)})

(defn run-jetty
  [port]
  (println "Starting Jetty server at port:" port)
  (jetty/run-jetty echo-handler
                   {:port port :join? false}))

(defn -main []
  (run-jetty 3000))

(comment ; "'Rich' comment form"
  ;; clojure -M -m org.evalapply.catchall-app
  ;; OR:
  (def server (run-jetty 3001))

  (.stop server)
)

curl -s "localhost:3001" | bb -e '(-> *input* :headers)'

(require '[clj-http.client :as http])
(http/get "http://localhost:3001")

(require 'clojure.pprint)

(-> server
    clojure.reflect/reflect
    ;; alt: cider pprint from edit buffer
    clojure.pprint/pprint)

(defonce responses (atom []))

(defn capture-response
  [response]
  (swap! responses conj response))

(add-tap capture-response)

(tap> {:status 200 :body "hi"})

@responses

(clojure.pprint/print-table [:status :body] @responses)

(require '[clojure.inspector :as inspector])

(inspector/inspect-tree (clojure.reflect/reflect server))

(require 'clojure.repl.deps)

(clojure.repl.deps/add-libs
 {'org.clojure/data.json {:mvn/version "2.5.1"}})

(require '[clojure.data.json :as json])
(defn TODO-override-echo-handler [])

(require '[clj-http.client :as http])
(let [base-uri "http://localhost:3001"]
  (http/get (str base-uri "/foobar?json=true")))