I was about to write that I broke my LLM virginity lately. I needed help with an obscure-ish library that assumes 100% proficiency in its domain to be used. Claude taught me how to use it and helped me troubleshoot a problem with the input data.
I still don’t view LLMs as killing programming – they are VERY long way from that – but I can’t deny that with the main search engines being near-useless, the LLMs fill some gaps well.
A useful trick is to periodically ask the LLM to refactor your modules for human readability and easy extensibility by LLMs. Usually this process is divergent for Python/React spaghetti code, but for Elixir and Claude I usually find that I understand the code better and the next pass Claude takes on the module generates better results. With the AI code assistant editors it’s easy to generate new code endlessly but it’s important when using these tools to pare back on occasion.
I haven’t used any LLMs for coding, but I’ve found ChatGPT to be very useful as a sounding board and an (occasionally mistaken) source of information for project planning, etc.
LLMs are brilliant in managing bureaucratic correspondence for you. All these prompts like “please rewrite ‘Are you goddamn bonkers?—I paid all my bills for electricity in the last year’ to sound politely and confidently in three pages of Shakespeare-like language.”
I was very against using LLMs for coding a few months ago and now use Claude often.
Maybe I mis-placed some of my “work identity” in being able to write “complex” stuff myself ..? It’s okay, there’s a lot of people quicker than me at algorithms. So if I precisely know what I need to do, and a bot captured that kind of knowledge for me to leverage, why not.
Elixir lends itself to write 100% pure functional focused modules for a lot of logic, and those are the perfect thing for both human and bots to work on : self-contained, no side effects.
Being solo I now find this tool useful for repetitive stuff, one-off things that will not make it to prod, and to lighten cognitive load when the day starts to feel long.
I also use it for discovery of other ecosystems, with two windows : one where I ask questions about how is the common stuff done, another with google to quickly cross-check.
On the other hand, I see how it can be a source of confusion for new developers. It routinely generates errors when I’m running it on very specific business things “outside of the set”.
In my (niche) hobby that involves scripts with math and optics I never got a single good result, equations came out mostly wrong and “reasoning” was very bad too.
Just don’t get fooled about thinking/reasoning. It’s sophisticated imitation, and parts of our work that are not unique can benefit from imitation.
I also feel that it’s quite healthy and human to have strong and polarized opinions about those new things.
Edit : removed parts that went off topic and made the post more concise… manually (-; .
Hello, sorry if this has been asked/discussed recently, i couldn’t find.
tl;dr; Whats ai setup (which ide/which ai and how integrated/what hardware) you have allowing ai support your elixir development?
Recently Chris McCord has teased with some ai integration for development. Chris McCord on X: "Another one. This one it stubbed calls to the weather API by serving its own dummy phoenix api controller and polling itself. Once it was running, it offered up ideas like adding weather animations. my god: https://t.co/B1wzGgjCHB" / X
Personally i use openai (20usd version) through browser (sometimes it helps, but i dont see huge life/game changing benefit), tried to link with zed, but zed requires api key, which i can get only with another princing plan for openai. (if im not mistaken)
Just few days ago deepseek released. If today you would by dev machine, would you consider local ai model, like deepseek as viable alternative to cloud ones and buy maxed out mac/pc?
I tried zed for the last couple of days, to test out the AI integration. I don’t think I’ll continue using it though. I’ve tried the AI integration with deepseek, but it seems like the reasoning models are not properly integrated yet. It will unfortunately write the whole thinking process into your sourcefile.
Also, I don’t think you have to buy a maxed out machine to run deepseek locally and get decent results, but if you have the budget might as well go all out 
I’ve been using cursor for months with Claude sonnet 3.6 and o1 mini and it’s great.
Not having to write all the code is the best
I’d been using codeium in vscode, and It was very helpful.
But writing a code and fixing errors myself is more fun to learn a programming language.