Why this, and where next

Alright - I'll talk a little bit about what I think Pricklypear is good at, and where I see it going

A lot of people have talked about how incredible Lisp is. Personally, I'm not totally sold. Don't get me wrong, lisp is wonderful. But I think for larger projects you just need static typing. I didn't like static typing for a long time, I totally get it. But for medium or big projects, I just don't know how you do big refactors without it.

That said, I think Lisp is like Ruby a lot, it's a beautiful and expressive language. So this is a lisp machine. And I think it's good for the same types of programs that Ruby is good at. So I did my best to clone Basecamp, hah.

Having an agent work with a REPL is incredible. I mean, it's spectacular. They can define functions. They can read and execute individual functions. They can build functions inside out or bottom up. They can build them top down. They can SSH in remotely and access the REPL while they're developing. It's pretty tight.

I don't think any other architecture can match Pricklypear for building web apps, and I honestly don't think it's even close. All of those LLM marketing idiots telling you about on-demand self healing software? Hey, this is it. It's right here. I don't think you can do this with any other stack? Maybe like erlang or something.

The future I see for Pricklypear or something like it is enabling LLMs to build on demand software for small and medium businesses. I don't even think you need to have a Pricklypear guy on staff? I mean you could, it'd probably help. But I think literally users can ask for features and they will be deployed. I've had some trouble getting the built-in agent to build out like a whole app from start to finish, but it can certainly add features. And that loop is closing fast.

I'm biased and deep in AI psychosis, but I'm telling you this is a much bigger leap than OpenClaw. Oh, you put your little crab agent inside a chat bot? Guess what? Mine lives inside a language which he is developing himself, and that language is also a fully baked web app. (Sorry, OpenClaw is brilliant, but I had to. You'll understand when you login the first time.)

Let's talk roadmap. I'm going to dogfood this thing for a while. Maybe some other people will do something similar. I don't really feel any obligation to build anything for anybody else. Get your own! But, I would like to get this thing to the point where it's functioning as a self contained unit, and like, my dad could hop on it and he wouldn't have to learn anything about Lisp Machines in order to use it. I think this is feasible. It's just a weird little platform to build apps on.

I'm hoping to get those apps fleshed out a bit. This is my new homelab center. I'm moving my life onto this thing. It's too good not to. So I'd like for those apps to feel really really good. Currently, they do not feel great. They are not cozy. I want calm, and I want cozy. Even though I can change these apps every day - I want to run them without changes for 5 years.

I initially spec'd this out to run on MirageOS, but we've scrapped that for now. I would like to make this happen eventually. For now, I remain an OpenBSD guy. If you want Linux compatibility, make your agent do it. (I use Arch for development, btw). So I think self contained image is a priority.

I would like to get some academic grounding on building this Lisp out. I don't know nothin about languages. Seriously. I just added floats to this thing. Also I think the language itself is called Nopales, but that isn't reflected anywhere right now. There is some sort of rudimentary effects system. I have no idea how it works. I don't really understand the subtleties of async, and the OCaml landscape is pretty confusing.

On a similar note, I'd like to get some education on formal proofs in software. I think that it is absolutely work spending some time trying to add formal verification to the OCaml outershell of Pricklypear. Lisp gives a great surface for the LLM on top, and I'm perfectly happy with a little jank there, but the core really should be incredibly stable.

I want to really polish up the node editor and the code editor. It should be a first class experience. Keyboard shortcuts, node navigation. I want it to feel as good as vim.

I'd like to see local-first LLMs, too. You really don't need much here. And the way it's designed, it would plug right into a local agent. That local agent really wants to generate his own lisp functions using a recursive bottom up function generator call!

OK, that's enough for now. This is about as much sharing as I do, generally speaking. I guess I could get on Twitter and try to shill this thing but I think I'd rather just build it instead.