I update the packages weekly, trying again now.

nope, still broken

I updated 5 days ago (packages, template and commits) and I just tried those commands, they both worked on my Clojure code. I use smartparens so wouldn't have noticed if something broke the paredit package although I don't think the paredit package itself has changed in a long time.

It could be a rogue parens that got into your code. Have you tried it with a new project?

it works after I connect to a cider repl. It used to work just fine without cider. I wonder if something changed in cider…

smartparens is not tied to any particular language and it works without CIDER running. Its been years since I used paredit, so dont know how much its tied to the way CIDER works. There have been a lot of changes in CIDER over the last year.