Why you want RAG in your Dev Setup, and how to do it for Elixir - Chris Beck | Code BEAM Europe 2024

CodeSync · August 13, 2025, 1:00pm

This talk was recorded at Code BEAM Europe in October 2024. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://codebebeameurope.com

Aside from the hype around code generation, the potential of information retrieval, especially retrieval augmented generation (RAG), is often overlooked. Here, LLMs are becoming the industry standard for retrieving information from documents. Embedding Models allow the retrieval of information based on imprecise search terms in a way that was not possible with full-text indices.

However, the application of RAG techniques on code bases is much less common. This talk sheds some light on the current state of retrieval augmented generation, how easy it is to use, and how it can empower development teams.

We will have a look at the general techniques, what online models are capable of, and what performance can be expected from local setups. We will explore the state of RAG support for Elixir, both as input-codebase, and as processing entity. We will further see what influence the coding style and the ingestion process has on the usefulness of the results.

Comments welcome! View the code-sync tag for more Code Sync talks!