S1E8: Show And Tell: Efrit: When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities
Vibe Coding With Steve and GeneRecommended by 1 HN commenter across 1 month, 2025–2026
demo · general · 2025–2026 on HN
Steve Yegge shows Efrit, a tool that gives Claude full control of Emacs, on the Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene show. Claude opens info pages, runs shells and even draws a Mandelbrot fractal in a buffer.
HN shares it as a fun demo of an LLM driving a live Emacs process and orchestrating its long-standing ecosystem.
Up next
10 mo on HNTim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools
ClojureTV
Recommended 9× on HN · 2014–2024
5 mo on HNCo-dfns Live Stream: Compiler Design and Architecture
Aaron Hsu (arcfide)
Recommended 3× on HN · 2018–2025
10 mo on HNTransformers, the tech behind LLMs | Deep Learning Chapter 5
3Blue1Brown
Recommended 13× on HN · 2024–2026
8 mo on HNDeep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy
Recommended 10× on HN · 2025–2026
8 mo on HNLet's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out.
Andrej Karpathy
Recommended 14× on HN · 2023–2025
8 mo on HNA Hackers' Guide to Language Models
Jeremy Howard
Recommended 8× on HN · 2023–2024
6 mo on HN[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models
Andrej Karpathy
Recommended 9× on HN · 2023–2026
4 mo on HNSparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4
Sebastien Bubeck
Recommended 7× on HN · 2023–2026
5 mo on HNLet's build the GPT Tokenizer
Andrej Karpathy
Recommended 5× on HN · 2024–2025
4 mo on HNAttention in transformers, step-by-step | Deep Learning Chapter 6
3Blue1Brown
Recommended 5× on HN · 2024–2026
4 mo on HNThe A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023
Center for Humane Technology
Recommended 11× on HN · 2023–2024
4 mo on HNLSTM is dead. Long Live Transformers!
Seattle Applied Deep Learning
Recommended 4× on HN · 2020–2023
3 comments from Hacker News
For anyone else curious about what a practical loop implementation might look like, Steve Yegge YOLO-bootstrapped his 'Efrit' project using a few lines of Elisp: link And for more context on Efrit this is a fun watch: "When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities" ▶ this video
i also thought i can't get used to it, but i can! otherwise, as others have mentioned it, remap the keys! also, you can talk to some LLM about it, if you feel it would be tedious to come up with better bindings. feed in the key bindings from `C-h m` of eshell, enumerate which bindings you want to carry over from traditional shells and instruct it to recommend you binding swapping pairs. i was able to get great results on such niche operations already from anthropic's opus 4.5 models but even grok or deepseek was pretty helpful already last summer. steve yegge's efrit takes this to a whole new level, by letting the LLM interrogate your running Emacs process live for documentation or function source code: link he demoed it here: ▶ this video
Another everything-is-new-again: link is Steve Yegge's drive-emacs-with-LLMs (I saw this mentioned via a video link elsewhere: ▶ this video )