Common Lisp Development Tooling

3/22/2026 at 2:15:15 AM

Not sure how my article even made it onto HN but HN has been my home page for 16 years so I'm pretty stoked.

A quick note, Common Lisp tooling documentation exists in a LOT of places, but I could not find a single beginner friendly map of the full development stack, so had a long chat with various LLM's to spin one up. Regardless of your views on this approach to things I hope the article helps some people get a better mental model of what the pieces are and how they fit together. It's helped me wade through a lot of choices and debug a few things.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 11:13:55 AM

Some time ago I read "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (scheme), but it gave me a lot of appreciation for Lisp in general. It's not that often I stumble upon articles about this language, but when I do I always give them a read. I found this one interesting so I posted it here. Glad it made it to the front page!

by 0bytematt

3/22/2026 at 9:03:18 AM

more importantly, as you precise below, you edited (and somewhat corrected) the article after feedback from /r/lisp. So it isn't only AI output.

by vindarel

3/22/2026 at 2:18:57 AM

Awesome! I've been reading SICP and Land of Lisp, and wanted to get a good idea of the ecosystem but was overwhelmed by the documentation. Thanks for making it easier for us!

by arikrahman

3/22/2026 at 3:03:49 AM

Thanks, that was exactly me.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 2:08:55 AM

There's also vend (https://github.com/fosskers/vend) for package management and per project isolation.

by rootnod3

3/22/2026 at 2:26:06 AM

This is cool, haven't seen it before and it takes a different approach entirely. It just clones the source code directly into your project. That can definitely go into the isolation layer slot along with Qlot, CLPM, and ocicl.

Thanks for the pointer.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 3:02:22 AM

Updated the article

by jadefox

3/21/2026 at 9:03:24 PM

This reads like AI generated text, which it probably is.

by Keyframe

3/22/2026 at 1:51:17 AM

I noted in the intro which LLM's I had used to research and edit with. Mostly because I could not find a simple map of the tooling layers in common lisp in one place so I "synthesised" one of my own. The map is really what I was in search of and AI helped make it so, however the article has been revised and edited a zillion times by me and contains a lot of contributions from the r/lisp community and for some it still has "LLM voice" so I don't know maybe my "voice" has gone LLM too lol.

Anyway if there are any specific corrections or mistakes in the article that need attention I'm always happy to get feedback.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 3:15:24 AM

Ok, presume it is. Why is this a useful observation? The author still needed to poke and prod the LLM to produce useful information. She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give, and hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.

I’ve used CL for years and the layered model fits with my experience yet I never conceived of it exactly that way. It’s useful. So what if an LLM wrote it?

by massysett

3/22/2026 at 4:52:11 AM

If it helps, the article “evolved” so I don’t really care that LLM’s had a part to play. I am setting up a development environment for Mezzano, the Common Lisp OS after getting it running on ARM64. I needed to understand the full CL toolchain to build an AI agent harness that could talk to Mezzano.

I figured out I could do this via SWANK. But kept hitting the same problem, the information about how all the pieces fit together is scattered across dozens of sources and nobody as far as I can tell had put a complete layered map in one place. Which I kind of already had from all the conversations and research I’ve been doing so I glommed it all together and posted it to r/lisp.

BTW the lisp community have been really helpful so I incorporated and continue to add all the corrections and pointers people have been giving. Case in point someone above pointed out vend which is an interesting approach that might be useful for my lisp harness project.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 6:12:26 AM

When I read an article, I am expecting to read the author's own experiences and insights they gained from them. Not the regurgitation of an industrial scale word generator.

> She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give

Then publish the prompts. Let me enter them in an LLM of my choosing and see what bullshit it hallucinates and diff it against the 'article'.

> hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.

"Hopefully"? Publishing something a stochastic parrot dreamed up under your name is ghost writing at best and spreading misinformation at worst.

by HexDecOctBin

3/22/2026 at 7:21:30 AM

The "insight" that I needed a map, and that I had effectively created a map from my research, reading and "prompting" was mine, but I have no problem with using fancy tooling to help me pull it all together.

If someone could've pointed me to some other fully laid out mapping of the CL tooling stack I would've been happy as the article was a rather time consuming side quest.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 6:29:39 AM

> something a stochastic parrot dreamed up

With more time and energy, human discovery and invention, the statistical mechanics backing the information digest will improve beyond any one human's lifetime internalization and idiosyncratic writings divined.

by __patchbit__

3/22/2026 at 6:36:47 AM

> will improve

If only I was capable of such divination.

by HexDecOctBin

3/22/2026 at 7:24:21 AM

What I do see is somewhat curated cache of what stochastic parrot dreamed of so I don’t have to burn tokens myself.

As I understand author is interested in the topic and didn’t simply publish total hallucinations.

by ozim

3/22/2026 at 10:01:48 AM

Author here. Deeply interested but not an expert by any means happy to have saved anyone a few tokens. I have done my best to fact check the content and the people on r/lisp have contributed a ton of corrections that I incorporated into revised edits. Always welcome constructive inputs if you have spotted any mistakes let me know.

by jadefox

3/21/2026 at 10:43:57 PM

> Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 were all used to help research and edit this article

by johnisgood

3/22/2026 at 1:24:49 AM

[dead]

by tug2024

3/22/2026 at 11:30:06 AM

There is nothing more tiresome than reading long winding texts written by LLMs.

by dfortes

3/22/2026 at 1:41:15 PM

Fixed it, there is now a link to the reference card that is simply the "map" and the legend with links for the CL tooling. 91% less reading required.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 12:35:44 PM

lol you are absolutely right, the graphic is really the bit that counts and I made a note directly under it advising that the giant wall of text under it isn't a necessity if the graphic gives you what you need. Will most likely chop the post up into a short one with just the graphic and move the text wall somewhere else. As to why there is a wall of text that is a wall of text in itself.

by jadefox

3/22/2026 at 2:03:25 PM

For what it's worth, the wall of text is extremely helpful. I, for one, learn mostly by text and whether or not an LLM generated this, the output is true it is well written and easy to follow. So long as it's also true I'm satisfied.

by shadowgovt

3/22/2026 at 2:52:42 PM

It's about as accurate as I can make it, it's been revised with input from the crew over at r/lisp and I've verified what I can. Note the real value is simply in the mapping of the layers of the whole CL tooling stack, and how they fit together. That's what made things click for me.

by jadefox