I forced Claude to play Tetris in Emacs
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The point of this seemingly useless exercise was to stress-test my elisp-eval MCP https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions/tree/main/tools/...AI hands it a string of Lisp, it runs inside live Emacs session, poking into it via emacsclient. Behaves like a REPL the LLM can drive - state persists between the calls.Emacs is a Lisp machine. Buffers, files, network, subprocesses, games, major modes, the UI itself: every feature is already an elisp function. Hand an LLM a way to run arbitrary elisp and it inherits the entire Emacs API for free. No per-task glue code required.The same MCP can drive Magit, Org, Eshell, Dired, eww, or anything else someone ever wrote in elisp. Tetris is just to make the point.
HN · launched Apr 11, 2026 · 13 upvotes (top 33%) · 0 views
Niche: scripting and execution runtimes · 56 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Developer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 56 launches in scripting and execution runtimes →
Could you build this?
Yes This is an Elisp REPL connector exposing an MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool over emacsclient, which consists of a small Python/Node script and a few lines of Emacs Lisp.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: emacsclient with elisp execution, Hammerspoon (Mac automation), Hyprland (Linux compositor), babashka (scripting)
Concerns raised: GitHub repo link returns 404, Unclear advantage of MCP over direct emacsclient approach
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 62 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 63 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 118 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Lichess.el · hn · 2026-01-27 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Interactive Common Lisp: An Enhanced REPL · hn · 2025-12-14 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I replaced every function in a codebase with English · hn · 2026-03-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Vim file browser that runs in separate terminal · hn · 2026-05-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Decipher x Claude Code · hn · 2026-03-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM · hn · 2026-01-27 · 111 upvotes · similarity 0.37
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