> LLMs to be bad at balancing parenthesis

Because you treating Lisp just like any other (non-homoiconic) PL. Give an agent a true Lisp REPL to mess around, and you'd be surprised. Things get very interesting. I still don't understand why more people don't do that - isn't that obvious first thing anyone should figure out? Like I can't even imagine working with Lisp without a REPL and structural editing - I'd immediately fail at balancing parens. Why do you expect a [dumber] machine would do any better?