path: root/2025/captions/emacsconf-2025-commonlisp--common-lisp-images-communicating-likeahuman-through-shared-emacs-slime-and-eev--screwlisp--main.vtt

WEBVTT captioned by jay_bird

NOTE Introduction

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Hey, everyone. This talk is on this tradition,

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intelligent agents in Emacs

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using my Leonardo software individuals,

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which I've mistyped as I just wrote here, I see.

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Thank you to Sacha and everyone

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at EmacsConf and Emacs, I guess.

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Sorry that I was running late.

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I'm screwlisp.small-web.org.

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I run those one or two weekly shows for a long time,

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the Lispy Gopher Climate.

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I'm active on the Mastodon at @screwlisp@gamerplus.org.

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I'm screwtape on lambda.moo.mud.org.

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And I ported, over the last kind of year,

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years, to some extent, I ported Eric Sandewall's system

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for developing intelligent software agents,

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which he finished working on in 2014.

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I got it working again around 2025.

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First, we're going to take a long arc.

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We're going to motivate... This is the idea.

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You can see I'm using Org Mode,

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which I hope provides a good example

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for all the Org-Mode-oriented talks this conference.

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But you can also see

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that I'm using Eduardo Ochs's eev minor mode with Org.

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But we can see a little bit of the difference

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between these two, and that will kind of evolve into

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my style with the agent communication in Emacs.

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So you can see I used eev anchors as my Emacs headings.

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In eev, you just evaluate Elisp expressions

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as links to places.

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An anchor will link you somewhere else in the document.

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So my table of contents links to my talk, I guess.

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Anchors come in two halves,

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so that's why I built that unique table of contents

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experience there. What else am I going to say?

NOTE Totally normal computing

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So first, let's just do some totally normal computing

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because intelligence is going to be difficult to describe.

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Let's just try and compute normally in Emacs in Org Mode

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and then segue more so into eev,

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and then maybe I would like if an agent was intelligent,

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I would think that an intelligent agent

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would do something like what I'm doing.

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It should be recognizably similar to what I do myself.

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I don't think the word intelligence is relevant

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if it's not related to something I'm not familiar with.

NOTE Using Emacs as a human

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Using Emacs as a human, reading headings from my article,

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using Common Lisp. Right, my friend jeremy_list

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wrote actually a big project,

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but part of it was base64 encoding,

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and I just yoinked his C code for base64 encoding, I think.

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This is just clearly some C-based 64 encoding.

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If you go to my blog, his project is actually a C++ project

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and you can see me doing this with C++ rather than C.

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But basically, you can go to my blog articles

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if you want more detail to read something instead.

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And then here's some embeddable Common Lisp,

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Jack Daniel's ECL ANSI Common Lisp compiler I guess.

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This is just what it looks like.

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You can see I'm using Org Mode trickily,

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using noweb to put the lines of the C source block

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in this one. We're tangling it to this file

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rather than evaluating it.

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So, you know, literate programming, tangle and weave.

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We're just using Org Mode

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like the other Org Mode people

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are all showing us this conference, I guess.

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Then we have to compile it.

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It's always hard to remember these invocations for me.

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Results file. The file is my .fas file,

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because the way ECL's C and C++ integration works

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is that it just has to be seen by compile-file in Lisp.

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I cached this earlier.

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Oh, I should actually start Lisp, actually, shouldn't I?

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How are we going to do this?

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(setq inferior-lisp-program "ecl"). We could M-x slime.

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Because... we better actually load this.

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I did a dry run before.

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I think we can just load this, because I already did it.

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But I cached it. Let's nuke the cache.

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Okay, I'm going to say that that probably worked.

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Now, as you saw, that base64 encoding

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was just, I guess, number to character code

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to other character code. So I wrote this higher-level Lisp one,

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but that's not really the point.

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Obviously, Emacs also has Base64 encoding.

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It's just a point that we might have

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C++ and C external programs

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that we'd like to be integrating

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into our Emacs agents capabilities.

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Here we can see a normal named Org Mode source block.

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that calls that function, then an Org Mode source block

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that calls Emacs's base64-decode-string as a way of

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validating it, I guess.

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We go to Org, so we can see...

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I have a named call to that function calling the Lisp function

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Org is just kind of like this.

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It's cached but I don't seem to have run it before.

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Then I do the Emacs decode.

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So if we just run this using C-c C-c,

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and we can kind of see

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what Org Mode is like a little bit here.

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All right, yes, so as we can see,

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oh hang on, let's run this as well actually.

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So the C embeddable Common Lisp

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base64 encoding gets us this.

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And then Emacs is decoding and gets us back,

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kind of validates it. I think I'm missing some things.

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I don't pad characters out to the correct byte lengths,

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that kind of thing, but it's fine.

NOTE using this via eev as a human

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And then I kind of contrast that to,

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I really like what my friend mdhughes.tech,

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game dev of the ages, calls REPL-driven development,

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which he says is kind of the opposite of literate coding.

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I think eev, at least for me,

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is kind of like REPL-driven development.

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So in eev, if you just press F8, the thing happens.

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And if it's a red star line,

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the thing is an Emacs Lisp thing,

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and otherwise it goes to the eepitch target.

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So if I do this, great, now I'm pitching to that slime

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REPL ECL I made. And then I pressed F8. Press F8 again.

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The string got coerced to a list.

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F8. Now it's car codified.

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I quite like this, because this looks like something I can do

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and understand doing and reason about doing.

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Then I form a command to send from Lisp to Emacs.

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Then I do it and I recover the string from the beginning.

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I guess I had one of these here. Oh, by the way, look at

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What Org Mode did with an eev source block.

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And then when I close the source block

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using C-c ',

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it brings me back to the Org doc,

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which was a cool synergy between the eev minor mode

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and eev source blocks in Org Mode that I noticed.

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And so I kind of want my agents to be like this eev usage.

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Clearly, Org is super powerful,

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but I don't even like writing calls like this,

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where you write the function that will happen last first,

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so you're kind of writing right to left, first to last.

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Whereas in REPL-driven development,

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I guess I'm writing top to bottom,

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and eev, I guess, executable logs

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are logs that are like that.

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So I kind of like eev's view for reasoning

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more than Org's Tangle.

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Obviously, Tangle is trying to do tricky things,

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but maybe they have different specializations,

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and eev's one is more close

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to my own version of intelligence, maybe.

NOTE Software individuals using eev in Emacs like a human

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Software individuals using eev in Emacs like a human.

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Yeah, you can always visit my blog post for more detail.

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Right, I made a CLOS object

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in Common Lisp to wrap doing this.

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It's not really the topic.

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It's in the appendix somewhere if you need it.

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So I've just executed that.

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You can look at the appendix in your own time.

NOTE Sandewall's leonardo system

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Jumping over to actually starting

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our hypothetical intelligent agent.

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I guess we're doing eev here.

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So if we open this, press F8 a bunch of times.

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Oh, and if you were cloning it yourself,

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I guess that's what you would do. setq eepitch-buffer-name.

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Oh yeah, if you went to an eepitch shell and then came back.

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You would have had to do that, but I didn't.

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I didn't, so I didn't need to.

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Sandewall's style is to use relative paths

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to tell which agent is acting inside a software individual.

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Remembering a software individual

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is potentially a bunch of agents.

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And we load... So one individual,

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all the agents in each individual share a kernel.

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So only one agent in one software individual

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is active at any given time, but the agents are separate.

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They just all have to share the kernel resource,

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which is the Remus agent. Oh, I got rid of this.

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And start the CLE is the thing.

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Oh, I did need to have an EmacsConf knowledge base.

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Well, let's just keep eepitching for a little bit.

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So I think I made... I'm going to call it emacsconf-kb.

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Right, that looks likely. And I think that the agent...

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I can check this. I could have checked that.

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I could have done something like (get emacsconf-kb contents).

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Yeah, and you can see

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there's a location inside it which is agent1,

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which I assume is an entity file

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that I was working with before.

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And then what were we going to do?

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Oh yeah, back to the embeddable Common Lisp image.

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So if I just press our button back to there...

NOTE Start a loop for one leonardo software individual

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And so my idea is that for an Emacs agent,

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basically, I'd like to have an Emacs Lisp list.

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And just when stuff gets into that list,

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the agent which is always running, but running slowly,

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will incrementally just do the stuff it finds in that list.

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Populating that list probably gets into stuff

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like your Beliefs, Desires, Intents framework

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and those kind of well-known and well-studied algorithms.

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That's not the point here.

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I just want to have a list in Emacs that my ECL...

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I'm just going to run a loop in ECL,

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and the ECL is going to keep sending

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anything it finds in that Emacs Lisp list

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to the software agent. The agent is also in Emacs,

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so it would be able to populate its own list itself

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if it had an idea of evaluating desires and chances to improve

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whatever it wants to improve

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and chances to avoid whatever it wants to avoid.

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We talked a little bit too much. Let's just start this.

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Sorry that I'm manually setting up my screen.

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Then let's put CLisp over here.

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Right, we could work with this, right?

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This loop isn't very important.

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It's just a Common Lisp loop. I copy my friend jmbr's style

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of using Lisp machine-style keyword arguments

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instead of symbols like cl-loop,

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the compatibility thing in Emacs Lisp does.

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I'd never initialized that. Well, let's do that.

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Okay, now we have the list.

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And just every 30, let's turn it down to every 20 seconds.

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Hypothetically, it's going to put

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whatever it finds in there, into there.

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And so, I think, yeah, and now... Great.

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So here I'm just going to fill it with stuff.

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And this is quite interesting, I think.

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It just shows I can put a whole bunch of stuff into that list.

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Ideally, the agent would populate it itself

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with a BDI algorithm or something.

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But if we just put some stuff in there,

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we'll see that it will all get sent

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basically using Eduardo's eepitch internal machinery, at least.

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And hence, it meets my requirement

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that it works exactly like I work.

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And then in eev, I just have to press M-e.

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Oh, it works via Emacs server, and I didn't start that,

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so if we server-start, hopefully...

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And then, ideally, things will just begin happening

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in this slime-repl C/Lisp agent.

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Oh, if this was still running.

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Okay, well we got at least one,

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but hypothetically lots of these will happen.

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So, show agent, I guess,

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happened over here. I put a whole bunch of "sleep-for"s in,

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because I thought that going slowly

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would make it seem more human.

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Like I saw in Eduardo's talk last year

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which is where I learned about eev.

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The system is a little fragile.

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Hypothetically, we have a whole bunch of agents.

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I guess every time it gets sent,

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it checks that we're in the right agent.

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And it's not actually just sending a string,

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it's sending a sequence of string actions over there.

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And so we see Emacs Lisp hypothetically put,

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I guess it put this "foo bar baz!" into an entity, message-1,

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which should be of type message, I guess, conceivably.

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I forget if I set that up earlier.

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It's in the appendix somewhere.

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And then it just called, it did a sequence of actions

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which was really just one action of showing that.

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And then I called b64-encode on message1,

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which I believe will have set message-1 encoded.

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Can I check that manually while it's happening?

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Disaster. Well that's what it should have been.

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Well, I did mention it was a little bit fragile.

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What if we put... Can we kind of rescue this?

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I don't want to try redoing this. It's slightly fragile.

00:17:07.240 --> 00:17:12.639
What it would do, we can see the actions are kind of getting there,

00:17:12.640 --> 00:17:16.719
but somehow my message didn't end up getting encoded

00:17:16.720 --> 00:17:18.119
by that sequence of actions.

00:17:18.120 --> 00:17:23.279
So this decode will have also made the decoded one be null.

NOTE Let's do it manually

00:17:23.280 --> 00:17:26.239
Let's just do it manually. Should have worked.

00:17:26.240 --> 00:17:30.559
b64-encode, which calls out to Emacs

00:17:30.560 --> 00:17:37.299
to get everything actually done.

00:17:37.300 --> 00:17:41.519
Oh, I got interrupted by the agent.

00:17:41.520 --> 00:17:43.320
Well, if I do it manually, it worked.

00:17:43.321 --> 00:17:53.519
Hypothetically, the queue thing should have worked. Great.

00:17:53.520 --> 00:17:56.840
Well, you can see it's kind of working.

00:17:56.841 --> 00:17:57.440
Could be more robust.

00:17:57.441 --> 00:18:03.640
The reason is that I think what I did is a bit fragile,

00:18:03.641 --> 00:18:07.107
but the intent is that FIPA,

00:18:07.108 --> 00:18:09.307
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents's

00:18:09.308 --> 00:18:15.639
SL standard has tools for reliability

00:18:15.640 --> 00:18:19.919
through repetition and checking outcomes and that kind of thing.

00:18:19.920 --> 00:18:22.959
So I would use those. I'm not putting too much work

00:18:22.960 --> 00:18:26.679
into being ultra-reliable right now, but it kind of worked.

00:18:26.680 --> 00:18:29.759
We saw, I guess, at least Embeddable Common Lisp

00:18:29.760 --> 00:18:35.599
believed it used emacsclient externally, asynchronously,

00:18:35.600 --> 00:18:38.359
to send these to Emacs within Emacs.

00:18:38.360 --> 00:18:41.599
I put a whole bunch of sleeps into its thing

00:18:41.600 --> 00:18:44.999
to make it look slow and human-like, kind of happened

00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:52.719
because Emacs' model is that it's kind of single-threaded.

00:18:52.720 --> 00:18:59.639
Can I just... I bet if we run this again

00:18:59.640 --> 00:19:02.119
It'll at least look like it's succeeding

00:19:02.120 --> 00:19:05.039
because I fixed the base64 encoding

00:19:05.040 --> 00:19:11.399
and so forth in the background. I wonder if it will.

NOTE Wrapping up

00:19:11.400 --> 00:19:15.559
In the meantime, let's wrap up this talk to some extent.

00:19:15.560 --> 00:19:18.799
Then I'm just kind of saying what I'm expecting to happen.

00:19:18.800 --> 00:19:20.479
I took out next action.

00:19:20.480 --> 00:19:25.279
Originally, I was keeping the list inside of the agent.

00:19:25.280 --> 00:19:27.879
Then I decided to keep the list inside Emacs

00:19:27.880 --> 00:19:31.679
because I have kind of first class Emacs is my IDE,

00:19:31.680 --> 00:19:37.607
so I have better access to what's going on in my IDE.

NOTE Intelligence

00:19:37.608 --> 00:19:39.559
Then I wanted to talk about intelligence a little bit

00:19:39.560 --> 00:19:41.199
in whatever my remaining time is.

00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:43.039
I just have these great bullet points

00:19:43.040 --> 00:19:45.559
of nosrednA yduJ and Eric Sandewall.

00:19:45.560 --> 00:19:50.039
So nosrednA yduJ, when she was on the show quite a long time ago,

00:19:50.040 --> 00:19:55.559
she... I keep describing things as expert systems

00:19:55.560 --> 00:19:57.039
and she wanted to know what I meant

00:19:57.040 --> 00:19:58.359
when I said expert systems,

00:19:58.360 --> 00:20:00.199
and I gave her a Lisp software example

00:20:00.200 --> 00:20:02.618
and she said she personally wrote

00:20:02.619 --> 00:20:06.279
that software in the 80s that I was referring to

00:20:06.280 --> 00:20:08.239
and she wanted to know how it was an expert system.

00:20:08.240 --> 00:20:10.039
What I mean when I say expert system

00:20:10.040 --> 00:20:19.839
is a system that works kind of like I do and eev's eepitch does.

00:20:19.840 --> 00:20:21.999
It's where we can really reason

00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:24.199
in a very human-relatable way

00:20:24.200 --> 00:20:26.479
about what the inputs to the program is.

00:20:26.480 --> 00:20:31.399
And also a program should be exposed to other programs

00:20:31.400 --> 00:20:36.559
in terms of like a well-structured transfer of knowledge as inputs,

00:20:36.560 --> 00:20:38.010
and it should have a well-structured

00:20:38.011 --> 00:20:41.939
transfer of knowledge kind of outputs.

00:20:41.940 --> 00:20:47.159
I don't know why this b64-encode message wasn't working.

00:20:47.160 --> 00:20:49.999
Then we kind of faked it into working.

00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:52.399
It's going to be embarrassing for me

00:20:52.400 --> 00:20:58.739
if anybody watches this. But yeah, so yduJ's thing...

00:20:58.740 --> 00:20:59.959
And then I was going to also build

00:20:59.960 --> 00:21:02.679
that into Eric Sandewall's one.

00:21:02.680 --> 00:21:05.639
So this is my vision of expert systems

00:21:05.640 --> 00:21:07.779
as kind of maybe this is an important

00:21:07.780 --> 00:21:11.679
general style loosely associated with Lisp.

00:21:11.680 --> 00:21:14.399
Same as the Lisp editor Emacs.

00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:17.665
So Eric Sandewall's description of intelligence

00:21:17.666 --> 00:21:21.159
was that his grandchildren were intelligent.

00:21:21.160 --> 00:21:26.439
So if we had software agents that were intelligent,

00:21:26.440 --> 00:21:32.439
this would be true if and maybe only if they were similar

00:21:32.440 --> 00:21:33.719
to his grandchildren

00:21:33.720 --> 00:21:36.319
who were a good reference for intelligence.

00:21:36.320 --> 00:21:39.199
And grandchildren live for a really long time.

00:21:39.200 --> 00:21:42.879
They kind of learn gradually.

00:21:42.880 --> 00:21:46.879
They don't run on GPUs for a few minutes

00:21:46.880 --> 00:21:51.879
and then get thrown out forever, something like that.

00:21:51.880 --> 00:21:54.959
And so this is the kind of vision of, I guess,

00:21:54.960 --> 00:21:57.919
the Leonardo system software individual stuff.

00:21:57.920 --> 00:22:03.946
You can see we kind of faked it into...

00:22:03.947 --> 00:22:06.320
at least the show get message one decoded bits were working.

00:22:06.321 --> 00:22:07.300
I'm not sure what was happening

00:22:07.301 --> 00:22:12.674
with the Elisp ones that worked interactively,

00:22:12.675 --> 00:22:18.607
but then they didn't work in my loopy thing.

00:22:18.608 --> 00:22:21.307
Oh yeah, and then so I mentioned

00:22:21.308 --> 00:22:24.640
thank you to Sacha at the start of this talk.

00:22:24.641 --> 00:22:26.974
And so Eric Sandewall's emphasis

00:22:26.975 --> 00:22:31.340
that you'd really like intelligent software agents,

00:22:31.341 --> 00:22:34.174
Leonardo system agents, to be like your grandchildren.

00:22:34.175 --> 00:22:40.659
And I was talking to somebody, maybe to Ramin Honary

00:22:40.660 --> 00:22:44.959
who's doing the schemacs talk this year

00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:46.874
about Sacha's writing.

00:22:46.875 --> 00:22:48.840
A lot of Sacha's writing is about

00:22:48.841 --> 00:22:51.774
her experiences of life and technology,

00:22:51.775 --> 00:22:54.374
and especially raising A*

00:22:54.375 --> 00:22:59.740
and her observations of her progeny A*'s

00:22:59.741 --> 00:23:05.319
experiences of life and technology,

00:23:05.320 --> 00:23:07.874
I would say as well as being

00:23:07.875 --> 00:23:18.039
the Emacs News and Emacs conf doer that she is.

00:23:18.040 --> 00:23:22.740
Yeah, and so I think a lot of what Sacha is seen doing

00:23:22.741 --> 00:23:25.840
and concerned with are specifically what Eric Sandewall

00:23:25.841 --> 00:23:31.207
identifies as the study of intelligence as such,

00:23:31.208 --> 00:23:36.479
as should apply to computing as well. That was my thought

00:23:36.480 --> 00:23:42.979
on Sacha, Eric Sandewall, intelligence, and yduJ.

00:23:42.980 --> 00:23:44.240
I have this note from pizzapal...

00:23:44.241 --> 00:23:46.274
I didn't realize that Microsoft had announced

00:23:46.275 --> 00:23:49.679
that 2025 was going to be the year of the software agent.

00:23:49.680 --> 00:23:51.199
I only found this out in hindsight

00:23:51.200 --> 00:23:54.199
when I saw people crowing on the Mastodon

00:23:54.200 --> 00:23:58.079
about how Microsoft had basically declared

00:23:58.080 --> 00:24:00.779
that their Year of the Agent marketing campaign

00:24:00.780 --> 00:24:04.459
was a failure

00:24:04.460 --> 00:24:09.279
where basically people didn't like the same old web services

00:24:09.280 --> 00:24:11.359
but now while you're accessing,

00:24:11.360 --> 00:24:15.239
while you're formally kind of accessing a web service,

00:24:15.240 --> 00:24:16.959
the kind of web service that used to be called

00:24:16.960 --> 00:24:19.279
serverless web services, this kind of thing,

00:24:19.280 --> 00:24:23.879
but you're just being gibbered at by Microsoft Copilot

00:24:23.880 --> 00:24:27.119
while you're trying to use regular services.

00:24:27.120 --> 00:24:29.279
And people turned out not to like this.

00:24:29.280 --> 00:24:32.399
I think that, as we can see in this agent,

00:24:32.400 --> 00:24:36.374
the agent really needs to be running on its own clock

00:24:36.375 --> 00:24:37.907
and independently of you.

00:24:37.908 --> 00:24:42.279
Like if you imagine your body is getting

00:24:42.280 --> 00:24:46.074
novel, slightly speculative instructions from your brain

00:24:46.075 --> 00:24:50.680
constantly throughout your entire waking day, quite slowly,

00:24:50.681 --> 00:24:54.974
this is what an agent should be like.

00:24:54.975 --> 00:24:59.540
And it should be... Sandewall wrote about this.

00:24:59.541 --> 00:25:01.540
Basically, computer programs

00:25:01.541 --> 00:25:04.840
aren't going to want to use human natural language with each other.

00:25:04.841 --> 00:25:06.674
There's nothing desirable about that,

00:25:06.675 --> 00:25:10.674
so you wouldn't have two hypothetical Microsoft agents,

00:25:10.675 --> 00:25:13.399
which are just regular web services with

00:25:13.400 --> 00:25:16.340
a GPT model gibbering at you

00:25:16.341 --> 00:25:19.839
while you're trying to use the web service.

00:25:19.840 --> 00:25:22.539
I think we can see...

00:25:22.540 --> 00:25:26.740
Microsoft did the wrong thing with the word agent,

00:25:26.741 --> 00:25:30.707
allowing that agent is an overloaded term like static.

00:25:30.708 --> 00:25:34.256
I'm going to stop this. I'm not going to try and fix this.

00:25:34.257 --> 00:25:36.313
Sorry, everybody. Thank you. Talk to you on the Mastodon.

00:25:36.314 --> 00:25:37.919
Hopefully, see you on the show.

00:25:37.920 --> 00:25:40.399
See you at your conference talks.

00:25:40.400 --> 00:25:45.599
My blog has writing and examples of this with multi-agents,

00:25:45.600 --> 00:25:50.819
more C and C++ stuff, Lisp things.

00:25:50.820 --> 00:25:53.439
You're welcome to come on my show to be interviewed,

00:25:53.440 --> 00:25:56.640
however formally we do that. See everybody next time.