Last year, I thought it was awful. Even Opus would reliably unbalance parentheses on practically every edit and then enter a doom spiral of making things worse as it tried to figure out the right place to put a `)`.

Recently, I’ve been quite impressed, at least with Claude. At some point they figured out the parens issue, and the code is largely solid and idiomatic. I’ve mostly used it with Polylith apps, so the context for any given change is naturally well-defined. Usual issues with failing to reuse existing functions or make sound decisions about architecture, but no more so than I’ve seen with TypeScript or Rust.

I think there are a few points in its favour: it’s a very concise language, the documentation is terse but precise and comprehensive, and while there’s obviously nowhere near as much Clojure out there as there is JavaScript or Python, there is a lot. As the Clojure demographic skews toward experienced, senior programmers, I’d guess the quality of that corpus is probably well above average.

Java stack trace errors might even be an advantage now.