Elixir is the productivity language of the Agentic era

Thanks for posting this! I’ve been trying to find a better way to advocate for Elixir, but it’s hard because of the perception that it’s difficult to find or train devs. Onboarding assistance seems like a great use-case for AI.

Can’t speak for the rest, but I believe that for many of us Elixir has also been the productivity language of the pre-agentic era. Personally, it took me like a week when I first laid my eyes on it to know there was no going back.

Encountering Elixir has been immensely changing for me pre-AI (6 or 7 years ago, I don’t recall exactly). Or maybe I was ready for a change, which made me encounter Elixir ? Anyway, since LLMs have eaten most of the public discourse about programming today, I hope a side-effect will be that new people will be brought to the BEAM for its specific properties as a runtime for agents, and that they will stay for what they discover

I think those are all good points, and they do match my experience.

For me an important point is that Elixir is very good at connecting to and bringing in other languages when needed for libraries or speed. Thus you are not giving up those. I have had good experiences with Claude using Rustler and Zigler, and between Rust, Zig and C that solves a lot of concerns with library coverage and intense processing bits.

Let me also give a shout out and big thanks to Credo, Dialyzer and Sobelow. The quick feedback is very helpful, and at this point any issues are typically short and few. Having such automated quality checks is reassuring.

I would have loved to use Elixir 5-7 years ago, but the companies I worked for, would not have used this, AI is the game changer for me, LLM LOVE Elixir!.

This articles and researches changed it for me

I am coming from java,golang,c++,javascript,python development worlds, because it’s the mainstream and you can get jobs for that in the age before of LLM, LLM I believe will change this, because the learning curve is lower, it’s much easier to add new libraries that exist in other langs/framework, meaning the world of programming is changing, instead of using the mainstream like before, AI-Human is the future and in this Elixir is the frontrunner, because all of Elixir developer friendly features, if you ask me new startups, new projects, will start consider Elixir more.

In my projects (Ruby, java, golang) in my company I see so much difference how LLM work with each one, in Ruby it feel so much easier, I do same tasks it took me 3-2 days in 20 minutes (I am talking about bugs/development/tests/debugging/etc.), in java/golang languages, it can take me 3-6 hours depends on feature, because the tools there are not the same level for developers as Ruby, the syntax and the runtime is tricker for LLM to understand, in my Elixir projects (private) it seem even easier for LLM to understand than even ruby, which is for me the killer reason. If you ask me the languagues of the future need to understand this issues. Elixir is the frontrunner in this.

Same. It was sometime in April 2016 so it’s almost 10 years ago now.

Everything just clicked. And I realized I’ve been doing programming very wrong up to that point. It was professionally and personally transformative.

I sincerely wish you’re right.

I’ve been playing quite a bit lately with ChatGPT (CG) and Codex CLI (CC). Python has seemed like the Golden Path for scripting, because most LLMs have seen massive amounts of it. And, if I don’t have to write Python, I don’t mind having it in my projects. I don’t find (cleanly written) Python all that hard to read. (Bash and Lisp, not so much…)

However, I have some upcoming projects which definitely call for Elixir, so I’ve been wondering how well CG and CC would deal with them. I’d really appreciate any feedback folks might be able to give on this, particularly regarding best practices, pain points, etc.

Side Note…

Some folks here may recall the discussions of mix format from a few years ago. Dave Thomas (@PragDave) said (and I violently agreed with him :-) that in-line spacing could be very useful as a way to highlight parallel structure and generally make source code more readable.

In my case, I mostly use this to vertically align comments and create “mock tables” for case statements, data structure literals, etc. However, I’ve also used it to line up the equal signs in assignment statements and parts of successive statements which had the same internal form.

Anyway, both Dave and I were dismayed that the formatter had no way to allow this practice. (It’s a feature… :-/) To be clear, I understand the rationale: if programmers uses their own stylistic preferences, teams may get into bikeshedding arguments, have difficulty reading each other’s code, etc. Thus, I definitely agree with José about requiring PR code to be formatted in the “official” style.

However, as a largely solo programmer, none of this has been an issue for me, so I’ve always maintained my own “house style”. I’ve often speculated about creating tooling that would let me maintain multiple style conventions, but it has always seemed like Too Much Work™.

Fast forward to 2026 and my adoption of LLM-generated code. Since I want to be able to read the generated code without pain, I’d like it to use my preferred style. However, if I run code analysis and cleanup tools such as Ruff, they will merrily collapse my carefully applied spacing.

So, one quiet afternoon, I had CC create a tool chain which:

• applied simple styling edits to its Python scripts,
• made copies of the scripts and ran Ruff on them,
• and edited the originals based on Ruff’s advice.

This works very smoothly, so I expect to extend it to incorporate more tools (e.g., Bandit, Black, Flake8, Pylint, Refurb, Vulture). Getting back to Elixir, I’ll certainly look into adopting the same approach regarding Credo, mix format, etc. (ducks!)

Same here (but with different formatting requirements, though).

This reminds me that I can now try having the LLM change how formatter works without spending too much time on that (hopefully).

Elixir remains unable to be taken seriously when its OLAP stack is so half hearted. Yes adbc, Explorer, but a python Polars expert very quickly starts eye-rolling when such obvious tasks as bigger-than-memory workflows seem to have been completely forgotten. Application of someone-else’s AI is great with NX stack, but trying to innovate within Elixir, the roots and culture as a website-creation ecosystem quickly become apparent. Let’s not forget that everything about AI workflows if you’re not just “taking” someone else’s stack (in this case python), starts with the ability to manipulate large multi-d data efficiently. And at this Elixir fails which is a real shame given such a robust foundation as the BEAM.

Nobody minds if Elixir doesn’t implement all of Python’s cruft, but what is necessary, is that the fundamentals be correct. So sure go all in with Claude, lash up some agents, copy-paste at will, but you’ll reach the limits fast if you’re doing anything serious.