[Cuis-dev] [Loose Discussion] LLM agents in Smalltalk

[Jaromir Matas]

Hi,

On Jan 5 2026, at 8:41 am, Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev
<cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> I use chatgpt, claude and gemini daily, but not for writing code. (I
> don’t even use refactorings much!). I think the reason is that
> Smalltalk systems tend to be very simple and small, and I often rather
> go over the code myself and review it and tweak it carefully, and I
> enjoy doing that. Also, the time I spend actually writing code is very
> small, I spend much more time reading code and thinking about it
> rather than writing it. So I’m not inclined to look for automated code
> writing (or transforming) tools.
>  

nicely said, Luciano, same here.

I don't know how many of you have recently tried to learn Smalltalk on
your own, without a teacher, from scratch. It's painful. At least
compared to mainstream languages where teachers and/or Stack Overflow
resources are available... (and I don't mean learning Smalltalk AFTER 6
other languages).

Having AI to guide you through learning, answering countless questions,
providing short but working Smalltalk snippets etc. would be amazing and
efficient, similarly like it already works quite nicely for mainstream
languages. Like having a teacher for yourselves :)

Thanks,
Jaromir

> But as I said, I use the chat bots daily. Sometimes I use them as
> rubber ducks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging), in
> the sense that I feel I extract value from the process of explaining a
> problem to them, and I don’t even care much about their response.
> Other times I find them useful to quickly go over conventions about UI
> design, and this helps me to avoid reinventing the wheel and makes my
> UIs more consistent with existing UIs. Or ask them about how different
> softwares approach a problem or implement something, and saves me the
> time of reading lots of documentation or source code (with the caveat
> that sometimes they hallucinate, and ultimately I might have go and
> read documentation or source code). So I find them very useful while
> coding, but not for writing code.
>  
> And, I share Ken’s concerns about the impact to the environment. And
> it bothers me a lot that big corporations own them, and that they are
> ripping all our content to train them. The world is going backwards,
> the open internet for sharing ideas between humans seems to be dying,
> and we’re moving towards centralization, control, enshitification, and
> away from human freedom.
>  
> That said, I expect to be surprised sometime in the future. I know
> people is working on tools to integrate LLMs with Smalltalk and they
> might create something amazing and useful.
>  
> Cheers,
> Luciano
>  
>  
>> On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 02:31 Michał Olszewski via Cuis-dev
>> <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
>>  
>>> Hi all,
>>>  
>>> I'd like to start a loose discussion around trend that has been
>>> happening in the past two years, namely using LLM agents for rapidly
>>> building prototypes and applications alike (infamously known as
>>> "vibe coding" if you don't know what you're doing :). More neutral
>>> term is "AI assisted workflow"). The "state of the art" advanced to
>>> the point where it's possible to generate, refactor and document
>>> entire codebases without a sweat using multi agent workflows, MCP
>>> servers, task-oriented instructions etc. - see Claude Code (Sonnet
>>> 4.5, Opus 4.5) ecosystem for example [1].
>>>  
>>> Since Smalltalk environments are quite walled gardens (code pretty
>>> much lives in the binary image, with attempts from Cuis and others
>>> to store packages in textual format) there hasn't been much motion
>>> towards integrating LLM workflows with the internal tooling, as it's
>>> requires dedicated communication protocol (any packages for that
>>> already? :)) and besides that, there wasn't opportunity to train on
>>> large chunks of ST sources.
>>>  
>>> Open ended questions (with my opinion for each of them):
>>>  
>>> given there would be proper integration (fine-tuning, dedicated
>>> package for interfacing, set of human-written instructions etc.),
>>> what do you think about using LLM agents for: 1) rapid building of
>>> prototypes or entire applications 2) progress verification e.g.
>>> whether implementation matches functionality spec 3) knowledge
>>> finding and example generation? For 1) and 2) see
>>> director-implementor pattern [2].
>>> do you think Smalltalk-like systems are more suitable for LLMs than
>>> file based languages? - The tight integration of tools-system is
>>> already there - there is no need to implement heavy MCP servers or
>>> RAG, just ask/explore the system for the answer! There is also
>>> question about token usage - context windows don't need to store
>>> entire text blocks anymore, only relationships provided by the tooling.
>>> given above, would local, task-oriented LLMs provide first class
>>> experience for us, just like one-size-fits-all models for the
>>> broader world? 
>>> References:
>>>  
>>> https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices
>>> https://github.com/maxim-ist/elixir-architect/blob/main/skills/elixir-architect/SKILL.md
>>> Cheers,
>>> Michał
>>> --
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>>> Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
>>> https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/listinfo/cuis-dev
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