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AI · April 11, 2026

IF

I forced Claude to play Tetris in Emacs

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…

In plain words

This project demonstrates an elisp-eval MCP (model context protocol) that allows AI language models to execute Lisp code within a live Emacs session via emacsclient. The tool functions as a persistent REPL where state persists between calls, giving AI access to Emacs's full API—including buffers, files, subprocesses, and UI features. The creator used Tetris as a stress test to showcase the capability, but the same MCP can control any Emacs tool like Magit, Org, or Dired without additional glue code. It's designed for developers exploring AI-driven Emacs automation.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

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.

Does the same job

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