Putting a Lisp on a Diet: How We Cut Coni's Boilerplate in Half (and Taught the Linter to Bully Us Into Using It)

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:55:00 +0900

There is a polite fiction we Lisp programmers like to tell ourselves at parties.

While Python developers are arguing about significant whitespace and Go developers are typing if err != nil for the 4,000th time before lunch, we swirl our artisanal coffee and say: “Ah, Lisp. Pure S-expressions. Code is data. Zero syntax. The ultimate expression of human conciseness.”

And then you open a real, battle-scarred 500-line production file in Coni—specifically one that deals with messy real-world things like HTTP APIs, JSON payloads, environment variables, SSH tunnels, and LLM tool calls—and you are greeted by The Staircase of Doom:

Code-Generation on NicoLabs

Putting a Lisp on a Diet: How We Cut Coni's Boilerplate in Half (and Taught the Linter to Bully Us Into Using It)