I have been using LLMs to write Elixir full time at work for months now. AMA, if anyone is interested.
I sometimes have different thoughts of approach than Zach, but this post really resonates with me. I've been in Elixir full time for over 10 years and would love to see an evolution in its adoption fueled by this.
I'm curious what your setup looks like. Do you use an IDE like Cursor or Windsurf, an editor like Zed or more directly an agent like Claude Code?
Have you used tidewave.ai? The demo from Jose looks fun, but I've yet to play with it.
What use-cases have LLMs shined in for you? I've really enjoyed using it to reduce the learning curve, eg to use Svelte and LiveSvelte on a small side-project.
(I've been using Rails for 20 years, Erlang & Elixir for ~10, but spend more time on the product side nowadays.)
> Do you use an IDE like Cursor or Windsurf, an editor like Zed or more directly an agent like Claude Code?
At work, we use both Windsurf and Cursor. At home, I also use Claude Code.
> Have you used tidewave.ai?
My coworkers have and are impressed, I can't speak to it.
> What use-cases have LLMs shined in for you?
Well, I managed to literally have it do all my work for 3 weeks. I didn't write a single line of code. That was pretty cool. I didn't even cherry-pick work best for the LLM. It was my normal flow.
I also use Claude code as an interactive tutor. I will have it implement something, break it into logical commits, then in each one break a few pieces and write tests for them and have me learn by fixing the broken tests.
LLMs greatly reduced my annoyance in learning various plumbing details in Phoenix (dead views), LiveView and Ash.
What would be days or weeks of impatient unpacking of long tutorials and guides has shrunk to days, in rarer occasions days.