Vibe Coding Reconsidered

A year ago, you couldn't vibe code in Lisp. Even the SOTA models had trouble balancing parentheses, and they'd hallucinate packages and symbols that didn't exist. A year makes a big difference in this field, and the latest models are capable of vibe coding moderately sized programs in syntactically correct Lisp. I have been experimenting with vibe coding in Common Lisp and I'm hooked. It is a blast. It is like having on hand a talented undergraduate who just took a Lisp course. If you give him small enough, focused tasks, he will churn out passable code. If you give him a good chunk of legacy code, he will churn out more code in the legacy style. The models are not good enough to do a full rewrite of a large codebase, but they are good enough to handle a small library with supervision. I find myself accepting a large amount of code with just a glance—if it passes the Lisp reader, compiles, and the tests pass, I accept it. Unlike the code of a year ago, the generated code these days is…