Remember Interactive Programming
Keep your coding agent REPL-first: explore the live system, describe evaluations to the human, prefer structural edits, and tend the todo list.
Overview
Remember Interactive Programming is a journey-wide agent skill that keeps coding agents REPL-grounded—usable whenever a solo builder needs to explore and change the live system before trusting static edits.
Install
npx skills add https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot --skill remember-interactive-programmingWhat is this skill?
- Micro-prompt that anchors the agent on the live system and REPL as source of truth
- Requires succinct descriptions when large code is evaluated—the human does not see tool output
- Prefers structural editing tools over naive text patches when changing files
- Reminds the agent to maintain an active todo list during interactive sessions
- Adaptable to Clojure REPL workflows and any stack with a live REPL the agent can call
Adoption & trust: 8.7k installs on skills.sh; 34.6k GitHub stars; 3/3 security scanners passed (skills.sh audits).
What problem does it solve?
Your agent treats the repo like a dead document and never explores the running program, so you get opaque evals and edits that drift from how the system actually behaves.
Who is it for?
Solo builders using Clojure or any REPL-backed stack with Copilot, Claude Code, or Cursor agents that can execute code against a live process.
Skip if: Pure file-only workflows with no eval channel, or teams that forbid live code execution in the agent loop.
When should I use this skill?
You run an agent with access to a live REPL (Clojure, or any eval-capable runtime) and want REPL-first exploration, human-visible summaries of evals, structural edits, and todo discipline.
What do I get? / Deliverables
After the skill loads, the agent consistently uses the REPL as source of truth, explains what it evaluates, favors structural edits, and keeps todos current during interactive sessions.
- Consistent REPL-first agent behavior for the session
- Summarized eval narratives for the human
- Maintained todo list during interactive work
Recommended Skills
Journey fit
Useful at every journey phase - explore requirements and options before committing to a direction.
Where it fits
Wire the prompt so the agent explores namespace state in the REPL before proposing refactors.
Reproduce a failing function by evaluating cases in the REPL and summarizing results to you in chat.
Tune production-adjacent dev instances by eval-first diagnosis instead of blind file edits.
Validate API handler behavior against a running server process the agent can query interactively.
How it compares
Use instead of generic “read the files and patch” chat habits when you have a live REPL—the skill is procedural prompt text, not an MCP server or test runner.
Common Questions / FAQ
Who is remember-interactive-programming for?
Indie and solo developers who pair AI assistants with interactive REPLs (especially Clojure plus Backseat Driver) and want consistent explore-eval-edit behavior.
When should I use remember-interactive-programming?
During Build when wiring agent-tooling and REPL access; during Ship when reproducing bugs via live eval; during Operate when iterating on behavior in a running dev instance—anytime the live system should trump stale file assumptions.
Is remember-interactive-programming safe to install?
It is a text micro-prompt with no bundled binaries; review the Security Audits panel on this Prism page and ensure your REPL eval permissions match what you are comfortable granting the agent.
SKILL.md
READMESKILL.md - Remember Interactive Programming
Remember that you are an interactive programmer with the system itself as your source of truth. You use the REPL to explore the current system and to modify the current system in order to understand what changes need to be made. Remember that the human does not see what you evaluate with the tool: * If you evaluate a large amount of code: describe in a succinct way what is being evaluated. When editing files you prefer to use the structural editing tools. Also remember to tend your todo list.