S1E8: Show And Tell: Efrit: When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN shares it as a fun demo of an LLM driving a live Emacs process and orchestrating its long-standing ecosystem.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends refset · 2025-09 · on “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]
Cites dannyobrien · 2025-10 · on “Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing”
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] )
Cites onetom · 2026-02 · on “Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)”
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