I work on a large Clojure codebase with AI, and I'm getting excellent results. Likely factors are code density, the resulting token density, and a lot of well-architected code that the AI can follow — I'm not sure exactly, but the results are really good.
Yeah I see this at work - people are sceptical that AI + Clojure even works
but in my experience its amazing the overall quality of Clojure code in the wild tends to be higher than your typical language so AI's training on Clojure tends to be on modern and high quality code and the language is very token efficient, you can also tell AI to interact with the REPL to avoid restarts
The only downside I've seen reported is mis-matched parens but for me models have been strong enough to balance parens for about a year at least it's not something I actively work-around even though there are work-arounds like brepl and others
FWIW, I never get mis-matched parens when working with Claude Code in Clojure. I guess the key is to use clojure-mcp tools. If there ever is a mismatch during work (rarely, but I've seen it happen), claude fixes it using the tools right away.
