Tendendy to start with Clojure edit for non-Clojure files

[simongray]

I work in a codebase that contains primarily Clojure which I spent several years developing, but also other languages e.g. Python. The use of clojure-mcp is quite central in my efforts as it informs the development of the comparatively smaller bit of recently developed Python code.

However, often when I am requesting changes made to some Python code, clojure-mcp (Claude) will spend a large amount of tokens attempting to perform some kind of Clojure edit first, give up, and then proceed with the regular File edit. It seems quite hard to avoid unless you prompt quite defensively, especially in longer conversations. I wonder if something in clojure-mcp can be changed so that it doesn't default to doing Clojure edits for files that are clearly not Clojure?

[simongray]

I should mention that this is on v0.1.8-alpha BTW.

It also does with with e.g. the replace s-exp tool which seems very out of place:

If I am using Opus it can often take a 30-60 seconds of processing to figure out it should be using the other tool instead which is quite significant (I am guessing it is wasting a bunch of tokens in all that time).

[bhauman]

So there are three solutions to this:

1. Prompt Claude to behave and edit the way you want it to, in your conversation (i.e. "Please use file_edit to edit python files. It's very inefficient and wasteful to try and edit non clojure files with clojure_edit tools.") . If you are using Projects in Claude Desktop you can add system message details in the instructions area. If you are running the edge you can create a prompt in config.edn to experiment with quickly bumping Claude back on track. This specific positive prompt should work wonders for this problem. As opposed to a prompt like "Don't use clojure_edit tools to edit non Clojure files." which can work but not as well.
2. We can should probably add some instructions to the Clojure repl system prompt. It would be great if you could experiment with this and see what provides good results.
3. You can safely turn off the clojure_edit and clojure_edit_replace_sexp tools while working with python, you can do this because the ClojureMCP file_edit tool fixes parens after the string replace edit for clojure files. The file edit tool has some limitations but it should probably work very well in this use case.

[simongray]

I'll experiment a bit more and report back.

[bhauman]

I adjusted the prompt to explicitly direct the LLM not to do this.

@simongray where did you end up with this?

[simongray]

@bhauman I mostly just pre-empted the issue by adding instructions such as "Please remember to use the regular file edit tool when not editing Clojure files" to my initial prompt, so I guess it is a similar solution to yours.