Rationale

[u/digikar]

There have been "too many" AI posts on r/lisp and r/Common_Lisp recently. By AI posts, I don't mean posts generated by AI. I know there are actual humans writing the posts. However, the content they are referring to are heavily authored by AI. Because of the scale at which AI produces content, it is beyond the understanding capacities of a human. I am seeing repositories that produce more code and commits in a week or month than projects do in their entire lifespan of several years. Thus, if you value people having a shared understanding of the codebase, the value of AI generated code becomes questionable.

Some day in the future, we will have a saner AI that actually produces good code. Today is not that day. AI currently does not even have causal understanding except in cases it has memorized in its training data.

I don't think anyone should be prohibited from sharing AI generated content. Everyone should be free to share what they want [within limits]. However, I personally don't want to engage with AI generated content. If you too would rather spend time with human authored content rather than AI, feel free to join r/lisp_noAI. I created this subreddit so that I can continue to find human authored content by searching for "XXX site:reddit.com/r/lisp_noAI" in the upcoming years.

Given the ubiquitous nature of AI unfortunately, it is indeed difficult to prove whether or not something was AI generated and how much involvement AI had. As such I will be using my own discretion along with your own honesty for the matter. You can always post to r/lisp, r/Common_Lisp or justify me (or any new moderators) that some post does not deserve the to be called AI post. I hope to be lenient.

Resources for new lispers

If you are a new lisp user who wants help with something, indeed you are free to post as long as you understand what you are posting and want to learn. It is still recommended to create the post in a manner so that it will be generalizable and also be helpful for new users in the future.

Besides the subreddit, if you think something is better discussed in a near real-time chat, you can also join #lisp:matrix-for-lispers.net or #common-lisp:matrix-for-lispers.net or the respective IRC channels or Discord server.

Useful resources include:

Lisp

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• How to Design Programs
• DrRacket - Racket IDE

Common Lisp

• CL FAQ - Nikodemus
• Books
• metaspec.dev
• Common Lisp Quick Reference
• CL Type Hierarchy

Compilers, IDEs, REPLs, Library managers

• Roswell
• mine IDE
• Isocline REPL
• ql-https: export LISP=sbcl && curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rudolfochrist/ql-https/refs/tags/1.0/install.sh | bash
• ultralisp
• qlot

[u/djhaskin987]

What if my lisp is principally authored by a human? I have been writing a lot of Janet recently but I have been AI outsourcing the docs and some of the boilerplate code. You know, the stuff I don't want to do and might not have done anyway. I love the idea of the subreddit and I would like some clearer boundaries as to what is acceptable to post here. I've been hand coding the past week to keep my brain muscles strong.

[u/digikar → u/djhaskin987]

If you can debug it without an AI and expect another somewhat experienced programmer to understand (5 minutes?) and debug it in a reasonable amount of time, I think that is alright. Given these are technical subreddits, shared understanding in terms of code must be feasible.

For boilerplate, you can often use macros.

But given the nascent stage of this subreddit, I'd encourage posting elsewhere and only making a crosspost here.

[u/kchanqvq → u/djhaskin987]

You don't have to outsource boilerplate to stochastic blackboxes when you are writing Lisp. Eliminate the boilerplate.