juanazam
I’ve been experimenting with a small pattern for using AI in apps.
Instead of replacing the UI with a chat, I tried using it to help users build filters.
So a user can type something like: “customers who spent more than $500 in the last 3 months and haven’t ordered recently”
and the app turns that into a struct and runs a normal query (Ecto in this case).
The important part for me was keeping things predictable:
- the model doesn’t generate queries
- everything goes through a schema
- you can still edit the filters manually
Wrote a short post about it:
Where Next?
Trending in Blog Posts
Other Trending Topics
Latest Phoenix Threads
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Bringing learning, work and compliance together since 1987.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #library
- #deployment
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #elixirconf
- #channels
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #podcasts
- #javascript
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #elixirconf-us
- #ai
- #blog-post
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #api
- #forms
- #elixirconf-eu
- #metaprogramming
- #hex
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Error tracking, logs, uptime, and Just Enough APM. Built for developers.
Elixir, Erlang & BEAM conferences from Code Sync - join us in 2026!
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
Master modern tools, write cleaner code, and tackle real-world challenges.
Bringing learning, work and compliance together since 1987.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Showing Posts 1 to 4- Show Best Posts
- Show All (oldest first)
- Show All (newest first)
joelpaulkoch
Cool! I thought about something similar a while ago: instead of creating filters you could give it a hook point where it generates a function that receives a collection of items and must return the HTML + CSS based on user instructions. Like “show items as grid/list”.
Definitely more complex and not sure if it’s useful at all but would be a fun experiment
tfwright
We are in the process of beta testing a feature more or less identical to this, although we needed to support fairly complex filters across multiple tables and in some cases with multiple params. We already had a conventional UI built out, and the backend to support the filter logic.
One thing we did was use the existing function and module docs from the filter logic using
Code.fetch_docsto build the LLM context. And then we added a bunch more detail and examples to function docs until the LLM was able to reliably return useful data. The filter logic also already had casting/validation so we could just use that. Took some fiddling, but the entire feature only ended up being a thin wrapper around ReqLLM, a context generator that pulled in all the docs, and an endpoint that called out to those and applied the validation and returned the result. And as a bonus we had more general purpose docs than when we started. Turns out a lot of the instructions that help Claude also help human devs.I maintain a small utility for dumping docs and as a next step I am going to try to use that to extract the “context baking” logic from runtime code.
juanazam
Definitely a fun experiment! The challenge of validating the response sounds complicated though
juanazam
So cool that you are releasing something similar in production!
Using
Code.fetch_docsto build the LLM context is really smart!Would love to see some examples of that reqLLM layer if possible!
Agreed.