The AI Curse

The Lisp Curse is, briefly, that Lisp is so powerful and expressive that it makes it easy to write code without collaborating with others and just write it yourself. If that sounds familiar, it's because that's what's happening with AI right now. Hundreds of stars instead of tens of thousands or thousands on GitHub for projects, dozens of implementations for the same thing, abandoned projects everywhere but that's okay because we can just use the code from them anyway because it's really easy to fix the code ourselves. Am I talking about vibe coding, or Lisp? (Both. The answer is both.) How to fix this? Well, we can start by our attitude. The Common Lisp community came together and preferred a patchy, messier language in favor of unity through political compromise. That is how the ANSI Common Lisp standard was achieved. It still suffers from the Lisp Curse, but there is still some semblance that the community is on the same page. There are still a handful of implementations for json…