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tapete1today at 1:07 PM5 repliesview on HN

I have asked LLMs several Emacs-related questions and _never_ got a reply that works. And at generating elisp code they are especially awful.


Replies

SoftTalkertoday at 1:50 PM

Same. I'm not an elisp expert by any means, so I tried using claude and chatgpt to help me write some functions. They got close, close enough that I could massage what they wrote into something that did what I needed, but they have never produced anything that just worked.

mrhottakestoday at 7:15 PM

Agreed, Claude didn't seem capable of doing anything but hallucinating "fixes" and breaking my config.

antiframetoday at 1:35 PM

That is not my experience. I had Claude add a variety of useful functions to my init.el as well as refactor it for easier maintenance. I now have a more useful to use and pleasant to edit init for it.

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cmrdporcupinetoday at 6:46 PM

Not my experience. I've had them write modes for new languages from scratch with excellent results.

And diagnose and fix up my emacs configuration.

Even back in pre-Opus 4.5 days I found them incredibly useful for elisp diagnostics, and these days I use Codex to great effect to enhance my emacs setup.

jr_isidoretoday at 2:50 PM

Try asking it a coding question, one that doesn't diminish your self-worth.