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Frame from S1E8: Show And Tell: Efrit: When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

S1E8: Show And Tell: Efrit: When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities

Vibe Coding With Steve and Gene
Demos
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this demo1 month2025–2026 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN shares it as a fun demo of an LLM driving a live Emacs process and orchestrating its long-standing ecosystem.

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.

“this is a fun watch” (HN, 2025)

1 recommendations · 2 citations · Demos · partly dated

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@refset Sep 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Designing agentic loops
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]
Steve Yegge demos Efrit giving Claude access to Emacs.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@onetom Feb 2026 Cites it
on HN thread Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)
Read more
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]
Yegge's demo of Efrit letting an LLM query a live Emacs process.

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