Learn how to power up your AI agent with Calva's Clojure tooling. Since Backseat Driver is a Calva extension, we will start by establishing how Calva supports REPL work and Clojure structural editing. Then we will go practical and hands-on, building some useful things. We will use a GitHub repository with all workshop materials, including slides, exercises, scripts, and some example prompts.

Example topics:

• Giving the agent access to Calva's REPL sessions
• Native Copilot tools vs MCP (other harnesses)
• The Backseat Driver toolbox: REPL, REPL log, structural editing
• Calva's multi-user REPL, for parallelized agent work
• Convincing the agent to use the tools
• The Awesome Backseat Driver plugin marketplace

Preparations. Arrive at the workshop with a working Calva development environment. You will also need an LLM subscription and an AI harness for VS Code, like Copilot, Cursor, ECA, etc. Preferably one that supports workspace-local MCP servers.

Peter Strömberg

Peter Strömberg, a.k.a. PEZ, is by profession a frontend developer using primarily ClojureScript and Replicant. By night he turns into The Calva Guy, pondering how VS Code can better serve its users with Clojure tooling. With Joyride as the vehicle, he also tries to persuade VS Code users to adopt a more Emacs-like hacker attitude towards their editor. Peter is convinced that a developer environment without a Clojure REPL is a broken environment.