Thanks for the suggestion.
dani
preciz
There is now an /ask command in aider’s newest version.
So for example you can ask about how it would implement something and if you like the changes then in next message you just tell it to apply it.
Tip: Also don’t forget to apply dark mode in terminal, for some reason it defaulted to light mode for me.
1
ajur58
I tried it and the workflow’s great! What I did is I generated login/register with phx.gen.auth, then tried to add another step to the authentication flow where the user has to either create a new company or join an existing one.
It took a couple of iterations to get it right and it got stuck at some point where I ended up with a broken, half-way done file, but in the end I got a working version.
I was surprised though that ~1.5 hours of coding with Aider + Claude costed me $0.95. Fresh Phoenix install with auth. Is this also your experience?
And the other thing that I keep wondering is: how big of a drawback is it that we use AI with Elixir & Phoenix, instead of JS/TS/Nextjs and the common stack? I love to use Elixir, but from a logical point of view, Claude has so much more training data for JS stuff & the gap will just grow bigger and bigger.
0
preciz
That is only a temporary drawback when it comes to Elixir I believe.
Because the context lengths of models get longer and using them is cheaper by the month, so probably soon you will be able to just send all the docs of the libraries you want to use and the model will figure out the rest. And you might not need to pay for that in every request because they will cache that for you.
0
D4no0
Call me stupid, by why we can’t have specialized LLMs for domain specific things, instead of “universal” LLMs that do 10 things and all of them bad?
For example for elixir, I would be more than happy to have a LLM that analyzed documentation of core libraries and most used libraries, because searching hexdocs is horrible sometimes when you don’t look in the right place. I don’t need code advices, don’t need some magical BS, just point me to the right chunk of the documentation with a prompt.
0
sbuttgereit
And nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I would suggest that rationally choosing Elixir already has to be in part to arbitrage some advantage over others that are taking more conventional paths… because if its not you probably should be following “conventional wisdom technologies” and not thinking outside of the box at all. AI will have more to draw on “inside the box”… and will offer a greater degree of consensus wisdom for those stacks as a result. But it will be conventional wisdom right, wrong, or simply mediocre.
I choose the BEAM, not because of tooling, because I though it would offer a superior, more reliable product experience for customers than could be delivered with the conventional stacks people will conservatively choose. Elixir was secondary to the BEAM choice as being the most expressive BEAM language for the problems I want to solve. Tooling and everything else on the periphery I expected not to be as well developed as they are with other, mainstream technologies… and they’re not… but I knew that cost going in and still happy with the choice.
1
D4no0
Well, that might be true from one side of things, but at the same time show me another language that allows metaprogramming and have libraries as expressive and powerful as ecto, phoenix.
The lack of tooling is a result of having so many possibilities and features, compare dialyzer with a static language like java and this is like talking 2D vs 3D in terms of types.
0
sbuttgereit
I can’t speak much to Phoenix (I’m not really a web guy), but Ecto…
This will be reasonably familiar to anyone that’s worked with Ecto… and with good reason as I recall.
Developers on all stacks like expressiveness and powerful libraries and work hard to solve these problem for themselves. I do think Elixir excels in expressiveness because of its functional and expression oriented design… but Elixir’s advantage in this regard is easy to overstate.
Again, I think Elixir is great language and that a more general applicability of the BEAM to actually running applications is seriously underappreciated… which is why I’m still here. But we shouldn’t be shy about where others may yet have advantages.
0
D4no0
I know about LINQ, but honestly I think it falls short compared to ecto if you used them side-by-side in real-world applications. LINQ is trying to tailor the language behind an ultimate library, whereas I can do the following in ecto:
defmacro st_transform(wkt, srid) do
quote do: fragment("ST_Transform(?, ?)", unquote(wkt), unquote(srid))
end
Here you go, I’ve extended ecto to my personal needs with 3 lines of code, linq and other libraries trying to do this will be never be able to achieve this by design.
1