[HN Gopher] Phoenix.new - Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
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Phoenix.new - Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
Author : wut42
Score : 532 points
Date : 2025-06-20 14:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fly.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fly.io)
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Ah man I'm really happy to see this and excited to try it out.
|
| As an Elixir enthusiast I've been worried that Elixir would fall
| behind because the LLMs don't write it as well as they write
| bigger languages like Python/JS. So I'm really glad to see such
| active effort to rectify this problem.
|
| We're in safe hands.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| in principle llms should do better on immutable languages since
| there is no risk a term will get modified by a distant function
| call.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| In my experience, it's the functional part, not immutability,
| where they fall short. Any LLM can write immutable C# because
| it's easy and there's incredible amounts of training data.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| good news, "immutable" is pretty much the only way that
| elixir is "functional" except for lambdas being first class
| datatypes (which is almost every language now)
| zorrolisto wrote:
| Same, I watched a video from Theo where he says Next.js and
| Python will be the best languages because LLMs know them well,
| but if the model can infer, it shouldn't be a problem.
| rramon wrote:
| Folks on YouTube have used Claude Code and the new
| Tidewave.ai MCP (for Elixir and Rails) to vibe code a live
| polling app in Cursor without writing a line of code. The 2hr
| session is on YT.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/V2b6QCPgFTk
| rramon wrote:
| That's the one.
| dingnuts wrote:
| since models can't reason, as you just pointed out, and need
| examples to do anything, and the LLM companies are abusing
| everyone's websites with crawlers, why aren't we generating
| plausible looking but non working code for the crawlers to
| gobble, in order to poison them?
|
| I mean seriously, fuck everything about how the data is
| gathered for these things, and everything that your comment
| implies about them.
|
| The models cannot infer.
|
| The upside of my salty attitude is that hordes of vibe coders
| are actively doing what I just suggested -- unknowingly.
| fragmede wrote:
| But the models can run tools, so wouldn't they just run the
| code, not get the expected output, and then exclude the bad
| code from their training data?
| bee_rider wrote:
| That seems like a feedback loop that's unlikely to exist
| currently. I guess if intentionally plausible but bad
| data became a really serious problem, the loop could be
| created... maybe? Although it would be necessary to
| attribute a bit of code output back to the training data
| that lead to it.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| For what its worth, AI already has subpar data. Atleast
| this is what I've heard.
|
| I am not sure, but the cat is out of the box. I don't think
| we can do anything at this point.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Worried it might fall behind... further? I love LiveView,
| Phoenix, Elixir, OTP. But the ecosystem is a wasteland of
| abandoned packages.
|
| If Phoenix.new helps solve that problem, I'm all for the
| effort. But otherwise, the sole focus of the community leaders
| of Elixir should be squarely and exactly focused on creating
| the incentives and dynamics to grow the base.
|
| Compare, for example, Mastra in TypeScript or PydanticAI in
| Python. Elixir? Nothing.
|
| Not here to bash. It's more just a disappointment because
| otherwise I think nothing comes close.
| uncircle wrote:
| All languages are a wasteland of abandoned packages, i.e.
| there is a very long tail of stuff no one has maintained for
| years. It's all relative to the mindshare. For its size,
| Elixir is doing quite well.
| erichocean wrote:
| Most languages require maintenance.
|
| Some languages--Clojure is a good example--have packages
| from 10 years ago, entirely unmaintained, that still work
| great because no maintenance is needed.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This is also true for Elixir though. A lot of
| "unmaintained" Elixir packages still work fine.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| That's their point (I think, lol).
| spiderice wrote:
| In my experience, Elixir is very much on that end of the
| spectrum as well. I'm wondering if GGP just considers
| packages that don't have updates for 6 months as
| "unmaintained" or "dead" because they come from
| Javascript world where everything is, well... you know.
| debo_ wrote:
| Broken and deprecated from inception?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| It's not the long tail. It's that the HEAD of packages in
| Elixir are also often poorly maintained or not maintained.
| The fundamental question for any developer: can I be
| productive quickly? Despite all that Elixir has going for
| it, the answer is often "no."
|
| Want a first-party client library for the service you're
| using? Typically the answer is "too bad, Elixir developer."
| And writing your own Finch or Req wrapper for their REST
| endpoint simply isn't a valid answer.
|
| >For its size, Elixir is doing quite well.
|
| I'm actually arguing the opposite. Elixir is not doing well
| because of its size. So how can that be influenced and
| changed?
| prophesi wrote:
| What packages in Elixir have you found
| unmaintained/missing in the ecosystem? Genuinely curious.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Probably the highest profile and most consistent example
| would be Stripe. The most popular Stripe wrapper for
| Elixir's docs point to a 2019 Stripe API version:
| https://github.com/beam-community/stripity-stripe
|
| Worse still, the quality of Stripe's own docs have really
| degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they
| have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a
| drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few
| popular languages and no option for "other". Example:
| https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart
|
| None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or
| Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging
| some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would
| otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the
| late aughts.
| movedx01 wrote:
| anything OAuth
| uncircle wrote:
| There is an excellent (maintained, funded, audited AND
| with official certification) erlang/Elixir library for
| that: https://github.com/erlef/oidcc
|
| I have just shipped a production service centered around
| OAuth and interfacing with OpenID Connect servers.
| conradfr wrote:
| Old packages usually still run great in Elixir though.
| mervz wrote:
| This is such a weird thing to say and I see it all of the
| time. It sucks people have been tricked into thinking a
| library must be updated every 2 weeks in order to still be
| relevant.
|
| You think just because an author bumps the version number of
| a library it's somehow better than a library that is
| considered complete?
|
| It boggles my mind that people actually think this way.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| You must never have been a Ruby developer. "I notice this
| library hasn't been updated in 8 days, is it still being
| maintained?"
| acedTrex wrote:
| LLMs not writing it well might be the biggest current selling
| point of elixir lol.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| Oh lol I love that angle!
| matt_s wrote:
| Selling point from a developer and career perspective for
| sure. Its also fun to program in and at least for me made me
| think about solutions differently.
|
| Its a negative point for engineering leaders that are the
| decision makers on tech stacks as it relates to staffing
| needs. LLMs not writing it well, developers that know it
| typically needing higher compensation, a DIY approach to
| libraries when there aren't any or they were abandoned and
| haven't kept pace with deprecations/changes, etc.
|
| In the problem space of needing a web framework to build a
| SaaS, to an engineering leader there are a lot of other
| better choices on tech stack that work organizationally
| better (i.e. not comparing tech itself or benchmarks,
| comparing staffing, ecosystem, etc.) to solve web SaaS
| business problems.
|
| I don't know where I stand personally since I'm not at the
| decision maker level, just thought I'd point out the non-
| programmer thought process I've heard.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| This is such a weird meme, Claude crushes elixir especially a
| fullstack app in liveview
| heeton wrote:
| Yea CC is great with phoenix / liveview. It's been doing
| things that teach me new tricks about elixir I didn't know
| yet.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| What's a good place to start for a completely naive but
| interested user?
| te_chris wrote:
| Claude and o3 are both excellent (if a bit erratic) elixir
| developers.
| pawelduda wrote:
| Claude 3.5 produces very good Elixir/Phoenix code. Haven't
| tried 3.7 much but I assume it's only going to get better from
| here
| neya wrote:
| I use o3, it's really good with Elixir. I prefer it to Claude,
| but Claude does a decent job as well.
|
| If you want to take your website and business down, use
| ChatGPT-4o's code
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| This last few weeks I've been going hard on LLMs to put
| together a new prototype project. I've exclusively been using
| Claude Sonnet 3.7 within Zed (via github copilot) and it'
| fantastic.
|
| From time to time it tries to do something a little old-school,
| but nothing significant really. It's very capable at spitting
| out entire new features, even in liveview.
|
| Over all the experience has very productive, and at least on-
| par with my recent work on similar sized python and nextjs
| applications.
|
| I think because I'm using mostly common and well understood
| packages it has a big leg up. I also made sure to initialise
| the phoenix project myself to start with so it didn't try to go
| off on some weird direction.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Assuming you are on the $20 Zed plan? Has the 500 prompts/mo
| been sufficient for you? I'm debating between the Zed and
| Claude $20 plans-- no doubt I'd get better value from Zed's?
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| I'm on the free plan and have been using it via GitHub
| copilot instead, as the current project is a work one and
| they pay for that.
|
| Before this I did a small project and I hit the 50 free
| tier limit through Zed by the time I was about 90% done. It
| was a small file drop app where internal users could create
| upload links, share them with people who could use them to
| upload a file. The internal user could then download that
| file. So it was very basic, but it churned out a reasonable
| UI and all the S3 compatible integration, etc.
|
| I had to intervene a bit and obviously was reviewing
| everything and tweaking where needed. But I was surprised
| at how far I got on the 50 free prompts.
|
| It's hard to know what you really get for that prompt limit
| though as I probably had a much higher number of actual
| prompts than they were registering. It's obviously using
| some token calculation under the hood and it's not clear
| what that is. All in all I probably had about 60-70 actual
| prompts I ran through it.
|
| My gut says 500/mo would feel limited if I was going full
| "vibe" and having the LLM do basically everything for me
| every day. That said, this is the first LLM product I'm
| considering personally paying for. The integration with Zed
| is what wins for me over Claude, where you'd have to pay
| for API credits or use Claude Code. The way they highlight
| code changes and stuff really is nice.
|
| Bit of a brain dump, sorry about that!
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Thanks, that gives me some new things to think about
| jostylr wrote:
| I have used Zed's plane with Claude and also Claude Code.
| They are very different experiences. Zed's agent work is
| very much a set it, go away, review, give some tips to it,
| iterate. As long as you use the Sonnet and absolutely avoid
| the burn mode (formerly max mode), it should do a lot of
| work for you. The main limitation I hit is the context
| window. As the codebase gets larger, it takes more context
| for it to get going and then it tends to have a hard time
| finishing. I find that about 4 prompts works for a feature
| that would take me a few hours to code.
|
| For Claude Code, the limit is reset every 5 hours so if you
| hit it, you rest a bit. Not that big a deal to me. But the
| way it works I find much more stressful. It is reviewing
| just about everything it is doing. It is step-by-step. Some
| of it you can just say Yes, do it without permission, but
| it likes to run shell commands and for obvious reasons
| arbitrary shell commands need your explicit Yes for each
| run. This is probably a great flow if you want a lot of
| control in what it is doing. And the ability to intercede
| and redirect it is great. But if you want more of a "I just
| want to get the result and minimize my time and effort"
| then Zed is probably better for that.
|
| I am also experimenting with OpenAI's codex which is yet a
| different experience. There it runs on repos and pull
| requests. I have no idea what their rate/limit stuff will
| be. I have just started working with it.
|
| Of the three, disregarding cost, I like Zed's experience
| the best. I also think they are the most transparent. Just
| make sure never to use the burn mode. That really burns
| through the credits very quickly for no real discernible
| reason. But I think it is also limited to either small
| codebases or prompts that limit what the agent is going
| through to get up to speed due to the context window being
| about 120k (it is not 200k as the view seems to suggest).
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Helpful feedback, thank you!
| debian3 wrote:
| Try claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
| nxobject wrote:
| Yeah - as someone who works in Common Lisp, I wish there was
| way to do complementary training for LLMs with existing corpora
| of codebases. Being able to read access documentation doesn't
| do much, unfortunately, to help with more general issues with
| correctness of output.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I found them to be pretty solid for writing Elixir (not perfect
| but neither is it with JS) the last couple of months.
| ipnon wrote:
| Chris is a hacker's hacker.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| A hacker's hacker who charges for closed source AI tools which
| work in hosted environments only. Yea, right.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Come on, devs need to eat. Companies need cash to employ
| people. After all that he has done for open source, you're
| complaining that something isn't free? You know you can
| export the code at any time right?
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'm not saying he's a bad dev, just hardly fits the hacker
| ethos.
|
| We want things we can tinker and toy with from the inside.
| martypitt wrote:
| This is really cool! And, that you did it in a few weeks is
| insane.
|
| How did you get VS Code embedded in your app? I'm aware of
| projects like Monaco, and that vscode.dev exists - so it's
| clearly possible - but I didn't realize it was something others
| could build upon?
|
| Again, kudos!
| moffers wrote:
| The mental models of Elixir/OTP and AI Agents are very
| compatible. I've felt for a long time that it would be one of the
| best platforms for building AI agents.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| Would you elaborate why?
| rramon wrote:
| Very cool. Does it use Phoenix 7 or 8 in the video?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 1.7 or 1.8, not 7 or 8
| rramon wrote:
| Thanks for correcting my typo.
| chrismccord wrote:
| 1.8rc, which is going 1.8.0 momentarily
| themgt wrote:
| This looks really cool, but I gotta say I'm a bit uneasy with the
| apparent(?) closed-source + hosted + branding. "mix phx.new" is
| the way to generate a new Phoenix project, but "Phoenix.new" is
| closed source Fly.io product for building Phoenix projects?
|
| Feels like we're getting into a weird situation if LLM providers
| are publishing open source agentic coding tools and OSS web app
| frameworks are publishing closed source/non-BYOK agentic coding
| tool. I realize this may not be an official "Phoenix" project but
| it seems analogous to DHH releasing a closed-source/hosted
| "Rails.new" service.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm surprised they are investing into this. I checked Phoenix
| recently because I was interested in LiveView and there isn't
| even an official AWS SDK for Elixir.
|
| Honestly doubt the AI stuff is going to move the needle much if
| you can't even have a dependable S3 client.
| conradfr wrote:
| But there's two actively non-official maintained libs.
| olafura wrote:
| What are you talking about, there has been a AWS client forever
| and I've never had a problem. It's not something you really
| need an official sdk for they are anyway often just reference
| because you might want different performance characteristics.
|
| https://hex.pm/packages/ex_aws
| https://hex.pm/packages/ex_aws_s3
|
| I've usually not seen more than 3 or so official SDK for most
| services and there are a lot more programming languages than
| that. For example Microsoft's Graph API doesn't have an
| official Ruby client, they have one that sort of works.
| Snakes3727 wrote:
| Neither of them are official which is often a non starter for
| some large enterprise customers.
| pier25 wrote:
| Not only large enterprise customers. Anyone who's thinking
| mid or long term.
| sysashi wrote:
| Why do you need an official SDK to make http calls?
| pier25 wrote:
| Why do you even need a framework like Phoenix? Just write
| everything yourself! /s
| olafura wrote:
| I still don't understand this. If you are big enough then
| you get Amazon to make an official sdk, if you aren't
| then what exactly are you looking for?
|
| The official aws cli used to talk to the soap interface
| and used regex instead of actually doing correct error
| handling and that was used by so many tools. Even though
| it used to break horrible.
|
| It's quite a niche you are talking about, not big enough
| to debug open source code but still big enough to require
| SLA for SDK and not being able to talk Amazon into
| creating it. It's generated code, it's not rocket
| science.
|
| What I have experienced is that software licence, where
| you are sending data to, where you are hosting it and
| having access to audit the code has usually been a bigger
| concern.
|
| But then again big organisations often have really
| specific concerns. So I'm not doubting your statement
| it's just that I have never heard it before.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _what exactly are you looking for?_
|
| I'm not looking for anything. I'm describing my
| experience when evaluating Elixir/Phoenix recently.
|
| I'm also questioning the investment into AI tooling when
| there are far more pressing issues that are hurting
| adoption.
| olafura wrote:
| If you want we can schedule a quick video call. Just
| curious about the problems you are facing.
| quaunaut wrote:
| The main lib everyone uses, :ex_aws, has been actively
| maintained for literally over a decade[1]. Official or
| not, it's used by literally the entire community, since
| even non-AWS services often will support its API.
|
| 1. https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws/releases?page=2
| techpression wrote:
| Considering the horror the official AWS CLI is this seems like
| a strange example. I've used both the non official libraries
| and they work fine. The one that is auto generated doesn't feel
| very Elixir, but that's to be expected.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I've used both the non official libraries and they work
| fine_
|
| Maybe fine today but what about 5 years from now?
|
| Can you say, with any degree of confidence, if these these
| libraries are going to be properly maintained in the future?
| No, you cannot.
| techpression wrote:
| Goes for every library out there though. Official or not.
| pier25 wrote:
| Not really. You can be much more confident the official
| AWS SDK will be available 5 or even 10 years from now.
| chrismccord wrote:
| Meanwhile I am a happy user of :ex_aws or :req_s3 which has
| done everything I need it to do. Object ops, iam policies, etc.
| A dependable S3 client has been there for years. The elixir
| core team doesn't need to maintain it. ReqS3 is one of my
| favorite things to use: https://hexdocs.pm/req_s3/readme.html
| pier25 wrote:
| Maybe _you_ can guarantee Phoenix will be maintained 5-10
| years from now but that 's really not the case for some
| random library on Github.
|
| If you look around you'll see this kind of stuff is really
| one of the biggest blockers for Elxir and Phoenix. Especially
| for something as fundamental as cloud storage.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Not sure what you're talking about..
| chrismccord wrote:
| Phoenix creator here. I'm happy to answer any questions about
| this! Also worth noting that phoenix.new is a global Elixir
| cluster that spans the planet. If you sign up in Australia, you
| get an IDE and agent placed in Sydney.
| troupo wrote:
| I know it's early days, but here's a must-have wish list for
| me:
|
| - ability to run locally somehow. I have my own IDE, tools etc.
| Browser IDEs are definitely not something I use willingly.
|
| - ability to get all code, and deploy it myself, anywhere
|
| ---
|
| Edit: forgot to add. I like that every video in Elixir/Phoenix
| space is the spiritual successor to "15-minute rails blog" from
| 20 year ago. No marketing bullshit, just people actually using
| the stuff they build.
| chrismccord wrote:
| You can push and pull code to and from local desktop already:
| hamburger menu => copy git clone/copy git push.
|
| You could also have it use GitHub and do PRs for a
| codex/devin style workflows. Running phoenix.new itself
| locally isn't something we're planning, but opening the
| runtime for SSH access is high on our list. Then you could do
| remote ssh access with local vscode or whatever.
| prophesi wrote:
| > Running phoenix.new itself locally isn't something we're
| planning
|
| So no plans to open the source code?
| chrismccord wrote:
| confirm
| abrookewood wrote:
| Everyone has to eat.
| prophesi wrote:
| For sure. I'm just hesitant to recommend sending one's
| codebase to a server running code I can't inspect. I
| suppose that's the status quo with LLM's these days,
| though.
| chrismccord wrote:
| "15-minute rails blog" changed the game so I definitely
| resonate with this. My videos are pretty raw, so happy to
| hear it works for some folks.
| fridder wrote:
| run locally or in your private cloud would be amazing. The
| latter bit would be a great paid option for large enterprises
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Amazing work.
|
| Just a clarifying question since I'm confused by the branding
| use of "Phoenix.new" (since I associate "Phoenix" as a web
| framework for Elixir apps but this seems to be a lot more than
| that).
|
| - Is "Phoenix.new" an IDE?
|
| - Is "Phoenix.new" ... AI to help you create an app using the
| Phoenix web framework for Elixir?
|
| - Does "Phoenix.new" require the app to be hosted/deployed on
| Fly.io? If that's the case, maybe a naming like
| "phoenix.flyio.new" would be better and extensible for any type
| of service Fly.io helps in deployment - Phoenix/Elixir being
| one)
|
| - Is it all 3 above?
|
| And how does this compare to Tidewave.ai (created as presumably
| you know, by Elixir creator)
|
| Apologies if I'm possibility conflating topics here.
| chrismccord wrote:
| Yes all 3. It has been weird trying to position/brand this as
| we started out just going for full-stack Elixir/Phoenix and
| it became very clear this is already much bigger than a
| single stack. That said, we wanted to nail a single stack
| super well to start and the agent is tailored for vibe'd apps
| atm. I want to introduce a pair mode next for more leveled
| assistance without having to nag it.
|
| You could absolutely treat phoenix.new as your full dev IDE
| environment, but I think about it less an IDE, and more a
| remote runtime where agents get work done that you pop into
| as needed. Or another way to think about it, the agent
| doesn't care or need the vscode IDE or xterm. They are purely
| conveniences for us meaty humans.
|
| For me, something like this is the future of programming.
| Agents fiddling away and we pop in to see what's going on or
| work on things they aren't well suited for.
|
| Tidewave is focused on improving your local dev experience
| while we sit on the infra/remote agent/codex/devin/jules side
| of the fence. Tidewave also has a MCP server which
| Phoenix.new could integrate with that runs inside your app
| itself.
| tills13 wrote:
| > For me, something like this is the future of programming.
| Agents fiddling away and we pop in to see what's going on
| or work on things they aren't well suited for.
|
| Honestly, this is depressing. Pop in from what? Our factory
| jobs?
| abrookewood wrote:
| Hopefully, from sitting by the pool drinking margaritas
| ... but I doubt we will get to keep our new found
| freedom.
| dkersten wrote:
| Never going to happen. More efficiency and automation
| won't lead to more free time and money for the masses, it
| will lead to fewer people employed, and those that are
| will be working the same hours for the same money but
| outputting more. Only the rich people will benefit.
|
| In the long term. In the short term, we get to do the
| same work but faster.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, why would an employer pay us a high salary to sit
| by the pool? The benefits will go to the
| founders/investors and the customers. They'll benefit
| greatly from the increased output and lower costs, but
| the middlemen (SWEs) will be cut out. That's a great
| thing if you're a founder/investor or a customer, but not
| if you're the middleman. New opportunities may come
| around, but I don't think that's inevitable. It remains
| to be seen.
| neuderrek wrote:
| It will not be easier for founders/investor either. If
| couple prompts is all it takes to build your product,
| your potential customers will write those prompts
| themselves instead of buying your product.
| freedomben wrote:
| Hot damn, that's a great point! Although I fully expect
| the models at some point to say stuff like, "I'm sorry I
| can't generate a <whatever> because that would violate
| Apple's/Google's/Whatever IP" and then have them enforce
| it with the power of government
| (copyright/patent/regulation/etc). There's also lots of
| industries where compliance requirements create a moat
| that might be difficult to get past, though that's
| probably just a short/medium-term problem.
| dkersten wrote:
| True. But someone at the top will benefit. Either it's
| the companies that can produce more of something that the
| end user can't easily replicate themselves for whatever
| reason, or at least the LLM providers.
|
| What I mean is, it will create value. Just not for the
| masses. And maybe not for the small businesses. If
| anything, it will let the big corporations do even more:
| a few big players doing everything and no little players
| at all.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > Pop in from what? Our factory jobs?
|
| Oh, you sweet summer child. ;)
|
| You will pop in from the other 9 projects you are
| currently popping in on, of course! While running 10
| agents at once!
| tills13 wrote:
| And from which exactly am I earning an income to feed
| myself? Who's buying what I'm making? Where are they
| getting their money?
|
| We're building a serfdom again.
| scottrblock wrote:
| How about our software engineering jobs, which will now
| entail managing a team of agents?
| tills13 wrote:
| wow that sounds fun /s
| brainless wrote:
| I understand that we are slowly taking away our own jobs
| but I do not find it depressing. I do find it concerning
| since most people do not talk about this openly. We are
| not sure how we are restructure so many jobs. If we
| cannot find jobs, what is the financial future for a
| large number of people across the world. This needs more
| thinking, honest acceptance of the situation. It will
| happen, we should take a positive approach to finding a
| new future.
| seanhandley wrote:
| Read up on the Jevons Paradox
| freedomben wrote:
| > In economics, the Jevons paradox (/'dZev@nz/; sometimes
| Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements
| make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing
| the amount needed for a single application); however, as
| the cost of using the resource drops, if the price is
| highly elastic, this results in overall demand
| increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.
| Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to
| lower resource consumption, rather than anticipating
| possible increases due to the Jevons paradox.[1]
|
| I do think there will be some Jevons effect going on with
| this, but I think it's important to recognize that
| software development as a resource is different than
| something like coal. For example, if the average iPhone-
| only teenager can now suddenly start cranking out apps,
| that may ultimately increase demand for apps and there
| may be more code than ever getting "written," but there
| won't necesarily be a need for your CS-grad software
| engineer anymore, so we could still be fucked. Why would
| you pay a high salary for a SWE when your business teams
| can just generate whatever app they need without having
| to know anything about how it actually works?
|
| I think the arguments about "AI isn't good enough to
| replace senior engineers" will hold true for a few years,
| but not much beyond that. Jevon's Paradox will probably
| hold true for software as a resource, but not for SWEs as
| a resource. In the coal scenario, imagine that coal gets
| super cheap to procure because we invent robots that can
| do it from alpha to omega. Coal demand may go up, but the
| job for the coal miner is toast, and unless that coal
| miner has ownership stake, they will be out on their ass.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| mxkopy wrote:
| The coal miner would have to pivot to being someone who
| knows a lot about coal instead of someone that actually
| obtained it, they'd become more of a coal-advisor to the
| person making decisions about what type of or how much
| coal to get/what's even possible with the coal they're
| getting.
|
| The future I'm seeing with AI is one where software (i.e.
| as a way to get hardware to do stuff) is basically a non-
| issue. The example I wanna work on soon is telling Siri I
| want my iPhone to work as a touchpad for my computer and
| have the necessary drivers for that to happen be built
| automatically because that's a reasonable thing I could
| expect my hardware to do. That's the sort of thing that
| seems pretty achievable by AI in a couple turns that
| would take a single dev a year or two. And the thing is,
| I can't imagine a software dev that doesn't have some set
| of skills that are still applicable in this future,
| either through general CS skills (knowing what's within
| reasonable expectations of hardware, being able to
| effectively describe more specific behavior/choosing the
| right abstractions etc) or other more nebulous technical
| knowledge (e.g. what you want to do with hardware in the
| first place).
|
| Another thing I will mention is that for things like the
| iPhone example from earlier, there are usually a lot of
| optimizations or decisions involved that are derived from
| the user's experience as a human which the LLM can't
| really use synthetically. As another example if I turned
| my phone into a second monitor the LLM might generate
| code that sends full resolution images to the phone when
| the phone's screen is much lower, there's no real point
| for it to optimize that away if it doesn't know how eyes
| work and what screens are used for. So at some point it
| needs to involve a model of a human, at least for
| examples like these.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _The coal miner would have to pivot to being someone
| who knows a lot about coal instead of someone that
| actually obtained it, they'd become more of a coal-
| advisor to the person making decisions about what type of
| or how much coal to get /what's even possible with the
| coal they're getting._
|
| I definitely agree that there will be some jobs/roles
| like that, and it won't be 100% destruction of SWEs (and
| many other gigs that will be affected), but I can't
| imagine that more than a small percentage of consultants
| will be needed. The top 10% of engineers I think will be
| just fine for the reasons you've said, but at the lower
| levels it will be a blood bath (and realistically maybe
| it _should_ as there are plenty of SWEs that probably
| shouldn 't be writing code that matters, but that feels
| like a separate discussion). Your point about other
| skills/knowledge is good too, though I suspect most white
| collar jobs are on the chopping block too, just maybe
| shortly behind.
|
| Your future is one that I'm dreaming about too (although
| I have a hard time believing Apple would allow you to do
| that, but on Android or some future 3rd option it might
| be possible). Especially as a Linux user there have been
| plenty of times I've thought of cool stuff that I'd love
| to have personally that would take me months of work to
| build (time I've accepted I'll never have until my kids
| are all out of the house at least haha). I'm also
| dreaming of a day when I can just ask the AI to produce
| more seasons of Star Trek TOS, Have Gun - Will Travel,
| The Lieutenant, and many other great shows that I'm
| hungry for more, and have it crank them out. That future
| would be incredible!
|
| But that feels like the smooth side of the sword, and
| avoiding a deep cut from the sharp side feels
| increasingly important. Hopefully it will solve itself
| but seeing the impacts so far I'm getting worried.
|
| I appreciate the discussion and optimism! There is too
| much AI doomerism out there and the upsides (like you've
| mentioned) don't get talked about enough I think.
| thermodynot wrote:
| Computers are not special. They are just a heat engine
| like everything else. We feed them concentrated energy
| that they dissipate to do work. They do work on data: we
| give it data (some of it is called code) and it gives us
| back data. It's all about the information content, how
| does that data communicate something and relate to the
| world?
|
| "Training" is just upfront work. Why on Earth people
| expect to get from the machine that processes data some
| novel information that did not exist before?
|
| This whole fantasy hinges on not understand the sheer
| amount of data these LLMs are being trained on, and some
| magical thinking about it producing some novel
| information ex nihilo somehow. I will never understand
| how intelligent people fall into this patterns of
| thought.
|
| We can only get from computers what we put into them.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Thanks for everything you do Chris! Keep crushing it.
| causal wrote:
| Do you have a package for calling LLM services we can use? This
| service is neat, but I don't need another LLM IDE built in
| Elixir but I COULD really use a way to call LLMs from Elixir.
| chrismccord wrote:
| Req.post to /chat/completions, streaming the tokens through a
| parser and doing regular elixir messages. It's really not
| more complicated than that :)
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| even less complicated, just set stream: false in your json
| :)
| b0a04gl wrote:
| this spins up a live elixir cluster per user session. how they
| handling hot code reloads across distributed nodes?
| b0a04gl wrote:
| the ai agent runs inside the same remote runtime as the app.
| does it share the BEAM vm or run as a port process?
| chrismccord wrote:
| The agent runs outside your IDE instance and
| controls/communicates with it over Phoenix channels
| b0a04gl wrote:
| how are they isolating ai agent state from app-level processes
| without breaking BEAM's supervision guarantees?
| chrismccord wrote:
| They run on separate machines and your agent just controls
| the remote runtime when it needs to interact with the
| system/write/read/etc
| b0a04gl wrote:
| appreciate the clarity, that helps.
|
| quick followup if the agent's running on a separate machine
| and interacting remotely, how are failure modes handled
| across the boundary? like if the agent crashes mid-
| operation or sends a malformed command, does the remote
| runtime treat it as an external actor or is there a
| strategy linking both ends for fault recovery or rollback?
| just trying to understand where the fault tolerance
| guarantees begin and end across that split.
| mrdoops wrote:
| Any takeaways on using Fly APIs for provisioning isolated
| environments? I'm looking into doing something similar to
| Phoenix.new but for a low-code server-less workflow system.
| chrismccord wrote:
| 1 week of work to go from local-only to fly provisioned IDE
| machines with all the proxying. fly-replay is the unsung hero
| in this case, that's how we can route the *.phx.run urls to
| your running dev servers, how we proxy `git push` to
| phoenix.new to your IDE's git server, and how we frame your
| app preview within the IDE in a way that works with Safari
| (cross origin websocket iframes are a no go). We're also
| doing a bunch of other neat tricks involving object storage,
| which we'll write about at some point. Feel free to reach out
| in slack/email if you want to chat more.
| mrdoops wrote:
| Thanks, I might hit you up when I'm in the weeds of that
| feature.
| finder83 wrote:
| This looks amazing! I keep loving Phoenix more the more I use
| it.
|
| I was curious what the pricing for this is? Is it normal fly
| pricing for an instance, and is there any AI cost or
| environment cost?
|
| And can it do multiple projects on different domains?
| manmal wrote:
| It's $20 per month if you click through, and I haven't tried
| it but almost certainly the normal hosting costs will be
| added on top.
| finder83 wrote:
| Thanks, apparently didn't click through enough
| sevenseacat wrote:
| I've tried it, the $20 of included credits lasted me about
| 45 minutes
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| How tightly coupled to Fly.io are generated apps?
| chrismccord wrote:
| Everything starts as a stock phx.new app which use sqlite by
| default. Nothing is specific to fly. You should be able to
| copy the git clone url, paste, cd && mix deps.get && mix
| phx.server locally and the app will just work.
| freedomben wrote:
| If you're willing to share, is maintaining that
| modularization the plan going forward? I'm pretty happy to
| use and pay for this and deploy it to fly, but only as long
| as I'm not "locked in."
| kuatroka wrote:
| Does it mean I can build and deploy a SQLite based app on
| fly.io with this approach without using Postgres? If yes,
| how does the pricing for the permanent storage ( add)
| needed for SQLite works? Thanks
| miki123211 wrote:
| 1. What's your approach to accessibility? Do you test
| accessibility of the phoenix.new UI? Considering that many
| people effectively use Phoenix to write front-ends, have you
| conducted any evals on how accessible those frontends come out?
|
| 2. How do you handle 3rd party libraries? Can the agent access
| library docs somehow? Considering that Elixir is less popular
| than more mainstream languages, and hence has less training
| data available, this seems like an important problem to solve.
| chickensong wrote:
| It seems like they're giving you lower level building
| building blocks here. It's up to the developer to address
| these things. Instruct the agent to build/test for
| accessibility, feed it docs via MCP or by other means.
| rramon wrote:
| They use the Daisy UI component library in 1.8+ Phoenix
| versions which should have basic accessibility baked in.
| Snakes3727 wrote:
| Hi just to confirm as I cannot find anything related to
| security or your use of using submitted code for training
| purposes. Where is your security policies with regards to that.
| tptacek wrote:
| Ask some security questions, I'll get you security answers.
| We're not a model company; we don't "train" anything.
| mrkurt wrote:
| We don't do any model training, and only use existing open
| source or hosted models. Code gets sent to those providers in
| context windows. They all promise not to train on it, so far.
| tptacek wrote:
| Did I not say it good enough, Kurt?
| NinoScript wrote:
| You said it terribly to be honest
| joevandyk wrote:
| _The Phoenix.new environment includes a headless Chrome browser
| that our agent knows how to drive. Prompt it to add a front-end
| feature to your application, and it won't just sketch the code
| out and make sure it compiles and lints. It'll pull the app up
| itself and poke at the UI, simultaneously looking at the page
| content, JavaScript state, and server-side logs._
|
| Is it possible to get that headless Chrome browser + agent
| working locally? With something like Cursor?
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Playwright has an MCP server which I believe should be able
| to give you this.
| tyre wrote:
| When Roo Code uses Claude, it does this while developing. It
| renders in the sidebar and you can watch it navigate around.
| Incredibly slow, but that's only a matter of time.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What is the benefit of this vs. just running your agent of
| choice in any ole container?
| tptacek wrote:
| The whole post is about that. Not everything is for
| everybody, so if it doesn't resonate for you, that's totally
| OK.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Oh geez so sorry for the dumb question! I read a lot about
| the benefits of containerization in general for agents, but
| thought it might be enlightening/instructive to know what
| this specific project adds to that (other than the special
| Elixir-tuned prompting).
|
| But either way I hear you, thanks so much for taking the
| time to set me straight. It seems like either way you have
| done some visionary things here and you should be content
| with your good work! This stuff does not work for me for
| just circumstantial reasons (too poor), but still always
| very curious about the stuff coming out!
|
| Again, so sorry. Congrats on the release and hope your day
| is good.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're fine! Just encouraging people to read Chris's
| post. :)
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Gotcha! I'll keep reading it I guess until I see what I
| am missing! Good job again!
| tptacek wrote:
| I did none of the work! I'm just like Flavor Flav or Bez
| in this situation. I will relay your congrats to Chris
| and the team, though. ;)
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Bad analogy. Bez was the best singer and most important
| member of that group.
| sorentwo wrote:
| Shaun Ryder sets a low bar. Definitely the best maracas
| player though.
| tptacek wrote:
| Kurt's our Ryder.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Huh ok! Well you sure are quite passionate. Thanks either
| way I guess.
| jonator wrote:
| I'm assuming you're using FLAME?
|
| How do you protect the host Elixir app from the agent shell,
| runtime, etc
| chrismccord wrote:
| Not using FLAME in this case. The agent runs entirely
| separately from your apps/IDE/compute. It communicates with
| and drives your runtime over phoenix channels
| jonator wrote:
| Oh interesting. So how do messages come from the container?
| Is there a host elixir app that is running the agent env?
| How does that work?
| Munksgaard wrote:
| Just tried it out, but it's unclear what the different buttons
| at the bottom of the chat history does. The rightmost one
| (cloud with an upwards arrow) seems to do the same as the
| first?
| Munksgaard wrote:
| I'm also having trouble with getting it to read PDFs from
| URLs. I got this error:
|
| web https://example.com/file.pdf Error: page.goto:
| net::ERR_ABORTED at https://example.com/file.pdf Call log: -
| navigating to "https://example.com/file.odf", waiting until
| "load" at main (/usr/local/lib/web2md/web2md.js:313:18) {
| name: 'Error' }
|
| /workspace#
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Is there something comparable that works similarly but
| completely offline with appropriate hardware? Not everywhere
| has internet or trusts remote execution and data storage.
|
| PS: Why can't I get IEx to have working command-line history
| and editing? ;-P
| Dowwie wrote:
| What LLM(s) is the agent using? Are you fine-tuning the model?
| Is the agent/model development a proprietary effort?
| krts- wrote:
| Is there a transparent way to see credit used/remaining/topped
| up, and do you have any tips for how you can prompt the agent
| that might offer more effective use of credits?
|
| The LLM chat taps out but I can't find a remaining balance on
| the fly.io dashboard to gauge how I'm using it. I _can_ see a
| total value of purchased top ups, but I'm not clear how much
| credit was included in the subscription.
|
| It's very addictive (because it is awesome!) but I've topped up
| a couple of times now on a small project. The amount of work I
| can get out the agent per top-up does seem to be diminishing
| quite quickly, presumably as the context size increases.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Include optional default email, auth, analytics, job management
| (you know... the one everyone uses ::cough:: Oban ::cough::),
| dev/staging/prod modes (with "deployment" or something akin to
| CD... I know it's already in the cloud, but you know what I
| mean) and some kind of non-ephemeral disk storage, maybe even
| domain management... and this will _slay_. Base44 just got
| bought for $80M for supplying all those, but nothing is as cool
| as Elixir of course!
|
| These other details that are not "just coding" are always the
| biggest actual impediments to "showing your work". Thanks for
| making this!! Somehow I am only just discovering it (toddler
| kid robbing my "learning tech by osmosis" time... a phenomenon
| I believe you are also currently familiar with, lol)
| nilirl wrote:
| Beautiful demo! How do I build agents like this?
|
| Does anyone know any great resources to learn how to design
| agents? Tool agnostic resources would be awesome.
| chrismccord wrote:
| Thanks! Everything is overly complicated in this space. It's
| probably far easier than you think. The open secret is it's
| just a loop that POST [provider]/chat/completions.
|
| Elixir is particularly well suited here. In Elixir this is a
| genserver doing http posts and reacting to the token stream.
| The LiveView chat gets messages from the genserver agent
| regardless of where it is on the planet, and the agent also
| communicates with the phoenix channel websocket talking to the
| IDE machines with regular messages, again anywhere they are on
| the planet.
|
| I talk about this quite a bit in my ElixirConfEU talk and
| distill things down: https://youtu.be/ojL_VHc4gLk?si=MzQmz-
| vofWxWDrmo&t=1040
| nilirl wrote:
| Wow, thank you for the link, it clarified how tool calling
| and "choice-making" works.
|
| It's like helping LLMs use a computer; like building an
| interface for it.
|
| Ok, this is enough to get me started.
| CollinEMac wrote:
| I'm a little surprised by the sentiment here that LLMs don't do
| well with Elixir. I've had a pretty good experience using AI
| tools on Phoenix/Elixir side projects.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| LLMs are definitely a lot better at Elixir than they used to be
| - the gap has closed somewhat. I still perceive a gap though,
| especially when trying to do more complicated things in Phoenix
| and LiveView (as opposed to just raw Elixir.)
|
| Which LLMs do you use that you find are best with
| Elixir/Phoenix?
| CollinEMac wrote:
| I haven't really used much other than Claude.
|
| I guess I should also note that I haven't really used
| LiveView much.
| vaer-k wrote:
| I've only used LLMs with Elixir, so I don't have any other
| experience for comparison, but I've found that although Claude
| frequently employs the wrong approaches in Elixir, I usually
| know when he'll have trouble and just ask him to read pertinent
| documentation first. So long as he's read the manual he seems
| to do just fine.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I've wasted a lot of time and energy on stuff that doesn't
| matter, so I can hardly judge anyone else on what they focus on,
| but man does it feel bad to have community leaders actively focus
| on building out tooling that is anti-worker. I think the only way
| I'd feel more conflicted is if Fly.io started building weapons
| systems for the military. I guess that wouldn't be shocking
| considering some of their lead's beliefs.
| mrkurt wrote:
| It's safe to say that if either Chris or I believed this to be
| anti worker, we wouldn't be working on it. He's spent the last
| 10+ years working on Phoenix specifically to improve the lives
| of the people doing the work.
|
| My experience with software development is maybe different than
| yours. There's a massive amount of not-yet-built software that
| can improve peoples' lives, even in teeny tiny ways. Like
| 99.999% of what should exist, doesn't.
|
| Building things faster with LLMs makes me more capable. It (so
| far) has not taken work away from the people I work with. It
| has made them more capable. We can all build better tools, and
| faster than we did 12 months ago.
|
| Automation _is_ disruptive to peoples ' lives. I get that. It
| decreases the value of some hard earned skills. Developer
| automation, in my life at least, has also increased the value
| of other peoples' skills. I don't believe it's anti worker to
| build more tools for builders.
| jonator wrote:
| Exactly. And as more software is written, the demand and
| possible set of softwares increase.
|
| It's really a matter of positive sum/growth mindset vs
| scarcity/status quo mindset.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > There's a massive amount of not-yet-built software that can
| improve peoples' lives, even in teeny tiny ways. Like 99.999%
| of what should exist, doesn't.
|
| We agree on this completely, however you and I know there are
| plenty of people without jobs in the world who could be
| employed to do this work. You are spending your finite amount
| of time on earth working with services that are trying to
| squeeze the job market (they've said this openly) rather than
| spending it increasing the welfare of workers by giving them
| work.
|
| > Automation is disruptive to peoples' lives.
|
| You know the difference between automation and the goals of
| these companies. You know that they don't want to make looms
| that increase the productivity of workers, they want to
| replace the worker so they never have to pay wages again.
| tptacek wrote:
| _rather than spending it increasing the welfare of workers
| by giving them work._
|
| Saying the quiet part loud here.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Do you believe making things easier and more accessible is bad
| for workers? I don't think it inherently is or isn't, it just
| depends on who benefits from the increased efficiency. I think
| that's more of a problem with your economic system, or wealth
| distribution.
|
| Overall I think we would all be happier if efficient machines
| take away the drudgery of our daily work and allow us to focus
| on things that really matter to us. . . as long as our basic
| needs are met.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > Do you believe making things easier and more accessible is
| bad for workers?
|
| Nope, I've been doing it for 16 years.
| jonator wrote:
| You can think of it as just automating the boring tedious stuff
| so us humans can focus on the harder problems like strategy,
| direction, design, GTM, etc.
|
| The days are numbered where humans are sitting typing out code
| themselves.
|
| It's akin to the numbered days of type writer secretaries of
| the 20th century.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I know what stories workers in the industry are using to cope
| with working with capitalists that have explicit goals of
| eliminating workers.
|
| I'm sure your poor understanding of the history of improved
| tooling, like "type writer secretaries", will be a soft
| comfort in the future.
| jonator wrote:
| And you don't think capitalism is the reason we have these
| computer jobs to automate away in the first place?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| No, because I've read a history book.
| yunwal wrote:
| The same logic that would lead one to believe that AI is anti-
| worker should also lead one to believe that software as a whole
| is anti-worker.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Sure, if you don't think about it at all.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| The argument you're responding to is effective enough,
| based solely on the fact that it has led me to second-guess
| whether I chose the right line of work, that it would be
| worth expounding on what you think is wrong with it.
| wturner wrote:
| Most tech isn't "Anti worker". What determines pro/anti worker
| are laws and government policies that reciprocate with the
| cultural norms we adopt. At the moment, money in U.S. politics
| is the most anti-worker phenomena I can think of. The ultra
| wealthy have a monopoly on the incentives that create policy
| and how our lives are ordered. The only power working people
| seem to have is the ability to impose consequences via rogue
| guerilla acts of protest and violence (Luigi Mangion) .
| Hopefully, AI is a Frankenstein monster the public learns to
| wield to facilitate more of these "consequences" and upend the
| monopoly the super wealthy have on policy incentives and change
| the way politics is funded for good. It's a new world and a
| Hawaiian or New Zealand doomsday bunker isn't going make a
| difference.
| __0x01 wrote:
| What LLM does Phoenix.new use?
| chrismccord wrote:
| claude 4 sonnet as the main driver atm, and a mix of smaller
| models depending on the scenario
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm building an agent right now (or rather, extending an
| agent I build a few weeks ago in a couple hours) and I would
| love to hear more about which scenarios get assigned to which
| models.
|
| (I almost just asked you on company Slack but figured the
| answer would be more broadly interesting.)
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Based on the blog post, Phoenix.new uses Claude 3 Opus as its
| underlying model, which explains its strong performance with
| Elixir/Phoenix codebases.
| rustc wrote:
| "Sign in with fly.io" takes me to a page asking me to pay $20 but
| the plan details are vague - what exactly is included in "$20/mo
| of Built-In AI Assistance Builds, refactors, and debugs right in
| your IDE"?
| tptacek wrote:
| This is a situation where we've been pushing on Chris to get
| this out into the world quickly, and there's a lot of packaging
| stuff like this that isn't fully put together yet. Thanks for
| calling it out! We'll get to it over the next week.
| mcdirty wrote:
| This is great. I had to back out of a phoenix project and rewrite
| it in Django because I couldn't get good AI assistance. I'm
| pretty inexperienced with Elixir and Phoenix but understand the
| benefits enough to want to make projects in it. So this is really
| cool.
| causal wrote:
| I had this experience too. Though most of my issues were with
| my model not necessarily with Elixir itself so much as
| understanding the Phoenix model, state, and CLI. Maybe even
| differences in versions? Wasn't always clear.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I find that baffling. Why not just write the Elixir yourself?
| prophesi wrote:
| Not just baffling, but concerning. LLM's are great for
| learning new languages, but terrible for outputting code you
| don't understand yet hope to maintain.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Yet, more and more people are going to be doing exactly
| this.
| sockboy wrote:
| Integrating AI assistance directly into an Elixir IDE could boost
| productivity, especially for newcomers. Excited to see how remote
| SSH and local workflows develop!
| gavmor wrote:
| Phoenix.new looks powerful, and I'll definitely play with it.
|
| I've been daydreaming of an agentic framework that maximally
| exploits BEAM. This isn't that, but maybe jido[0] is what I'm
| looking for.
|
| 0. https://github.com/agentjido/jido
| fridder wrote:
| TIL; That is a very interesting library
| mstibbard wrote:
| This thread on Elixir Forum is a good read if you are
| considering building agents with Elixir. Jido's author weighs
| in also.
|
| https://elixirforum.com/t/is-anyone-working-on-ai-agents-
| in-...
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Why wouldn't LLMs work as well with Elixir as python or JS? LLMs
| don't parse an AST.
| lawn wrote:
| Because of the amount of Python and JS in the wild is much more
| than the amount of Elixir code, so the LLMs have much more data
| to base their answers on.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Thanks
| jsmo wrote:
| Hmm, just signed up to check it out but no trial just "$20/mo of
| Built-In AI Assistance" without any mention of usage limits?
| afro88 wrote:
| Same. Agents can be very expensive. Plus I have no idea how
| reliable or effective this actually is in practice. Would love
| to try it first.
| ativzzz wrote:
| This is very cool. I think the primary innovation here is
| twofold:
|
| 1. Remote agent - it's a containerized environment where the
| agent can run loose and do whatever - it doesn't need approval
| for user tasks because it's in an isolated environment (though it
| could still accidentally do destructive actions like edit git
| history). I think this alone is a separate service that needs to
| be productionized. When I run claude code in my terminal,
| automatically spin up the agent in an isolated environment
| (locally or remotely) and have it go wild. Easy to run things in
| parallel
|
| 2. Deep integration with fly. Everyone will be trying to embed AI
| deep into their product. Instead of having to talk to chatgpt and
| copy paste output, I should be able to directly interact with
| whatever product I'm using and interact with my data in the
| product using tools. In this case, it's deploying my web app
| indigodaddy wrote:
| look into Kasm workspaces.. great way to spin up remote docker-
| based linux desktops, and works great as an AI dev environment
| that you can use wherever you happen to be. There is homedir
| persistence, and package persistence can be achieved via some
| extra configuration that allows for Brew homedir-based package
| persistence.
|
| https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/kasmweb/comments/1l7k2o8/workaround...
| risyachka wrote:
| >> Remote agent - it's a containerized environment where the
| agent can run loose and do whatever
|
| How is this innovation?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Many people have not experienced the async agent workflow yet
| and fairly the major providers didn't have offerings for them
| until a month or two ago.
|
| It's in fact one of my predictors for if they are going to be
| enthusiastic about agents or not.
|
| And you wouldn't think containerization would be a big leap
| but this stuff is so new and moving so fast that combining
| them with existing tech can surprise people.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| It's less innovative and more trendy. A lot of the fly
| integration can be achieved by simply asking claude code to
| look up the docs for the fly cli tool.
| brainless wrote:
| I have recently been working with Google Jules and it has a
| similar approach. It spins up VMs and goes through tasks given.
|
| It does not handle any infrastructure, so no hosting. It allows
| me to set multiple small tasks, come back and check, confirm
| and move forward to see a new branch on GitHub. I open a PR, do
| my checks (locally if I need to) and merge.
| krts- wrote:
| This is incredible. It does seem quite expensive compared to Zed
| or Claude Code now it's on Pro. But neat enough I've burned
| through the $20 subscription credit despite being a bit of an AI
| sceptic. This seems to have a much better handle on UI design
| (unless I'm missing something with the other agents), but as a
| solo dev I'm becoming quite convinced. It's also got me to try
| out fly again.
|
| I couldn't get Tidewave working but I must try again to see if
| Tidewave with Claude Code would offer this level of awesome.
|
| ps. @fly - please let me buy more credit, I just get an error!
| chrismccord wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Send your fly email to chris@fly.io
| and I'll get things sorted out. We'll throw you some credits
| for the trouble :)
| krts- wrote:
| Hero.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What model is it using for all the agentic work?
|
| What usage limits do we get with the $20 monthly price?
|
| Thank you!
| unvs wrote:
| Any chance of open sourcing the model instructions for this? Do
| you feed it all the Phoenix/LiveView/Elixir docs, or have you
| written more specialised instructions?
|
| I find Claude to have quite a bit of problems trying to navigate
| changesets + forms + streams in my codebase, just wondered if you
| had any tips of making it understand better :)
| qudat wrote:
| Technically this is really. Practically I don't understand the
| point. Who is the target demographic? People that don't have a
| local dev environment?
| abrookewood wrote:
| It's not really about the remote IDE. It's about an integrated
| environment where the agent can do everything it needs (install
| OS packages, inspect the code, view the app via a browser etc)
| in order to build what you want. It could end up being the
| place you 'start' an app, before exporting it and fleshing out
| the features locally.
| qudat wrote:
| So the primary benefit over any other AI agent IDEs is it has
| access to a browser?
|
| Ya I really am not the target demographic for this since I
| don't use AI agents in my IDE anyway.
|
| It does seem to perfectly fit fly.io in the sense that I also
| don't care about "edge" apps.
| losvedir wrote:
| This is very neat, and right up my alley as both someone really
| into Elixir and who thinks agentic AI is the future.
|
| I have a question about how you manage context, and what model
| you use. Gemini seems the best at working with give context
| windows right now, but even that has its limitations. Thinking
| about working with Claude Code, a fair bit of my strategizing is
| in breaking down work and managing project state to keep context
| size manageable.
|
| I'm watching the linked video and it's amazing seeing it in
| action, but I'm imagining continuing to work on a project and
| wondering if it will start losing its way so to speak. Can you
| have it summarize stuff, and can you start a session clean with
| those summaries, and have it "forget" files it won't need to use
| for this next feature, etc?
| tough wrote:
| this is the excuse i needed to revisit phoenix-elixir after a
| decade
|
| ty fly team
| indigodaddy wrote:
| So is Phoenix.new a Fly.io product, or just under the fly
| umbrella? Also, is pricing clearly laid out anywhere (including
| what the additional costs are for permanently deployed/hosted
| services that arise from Phoenix) ? Didn't dig too hard
| admittedly, but wasn't obvious where to find or look for pricing
| information on the front page on mobile
| toolhouseAI wrote:
| Hey @chrismccord, very confused but this is a collab between you
| and the FLY.IO project right? Like I can't eject the app from
| this and run it myself? This isn't an open source Phoenix
| project?
| olafura wrote:
| You can just use git to clone the code
| zombiwoof wrote:
| it's wild to me all this progress with AI, but at the same time,
| on my brand new mac, going through the readme to try out phoenix,
| it can't even get past the first step without an error (says it
| can't find postgres), yet the docs say I don't need postgres and
| it will default to sqllite if postgres and mysql can't be found.
|
| hard to put confidence in AI vibe hacks when the basic stuff just
| doesn't work.
|
| * (Mix) The database for Myapp.Repo couldn't be created: killed
| psadri wrote:
| I love the idea of Phoenix and server side rendering (I happen to
| work on SkyMass, a related project).
|
| This is a tangential comment and should not detract from what
| Chris and team have created. I think closing the loop between
| agent and the running output is a great/critical step forward.
|
| However, I find using AI to build transitional Apps with a UI is
| a bit like improving the way automobile steering wheels are made.
| In a world that soon won't need steering wheels at all.
|
| If the AI is so good to write the code for an App, how much
| longer before you won't need those Apps in the first place? And
| then the question is, what will fill the role that Apps play
| today.
| colecut wrote:
| I don't think we want to move to a world where everything we
| use is AI driven all the time.
|
| A coded app is significantly more efficient to execute, and
| more predictable, than dealing with AI in most situations.
| psadri wrote:
| I don't disagree that code is far more efficient than
| inference. But what are those apps? A lot of apps are
| fetching some data, massaging it, rendering UI to let the
| user view / update data. Could the AI do some of that "work"
| for you, so that you don't need those dashboards / buttons /
| forms in the first place? Maybe you have an agent that does a
| db query (instead of a human viewing a dashboard) and takes
| some action (instead of the human clicking a button).
| liampulles wrote:
| I think it boils down to: if the AI screws up what I asked it
| to do, who do I have to hold accountable? If the answer is that
| there is no one I can hold accountable, because the AI agent I
| used removes any and all onus of responsibility in its terms of
| service, then I'm not going to use it for anything non-trivial.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I'm torn on "is this the future".
|
| I worked all day on a Phoenix app we're developing for ag
| irrigation analysis. Of late, my "let's see what $20/mo gets you"
| is Zed with its genetic offerings.
|
| It actually writes very little Elixir code for me. Sometimes, I
| let it have a go, but mostly I end up rewriting that stuff.
| Elixir is fun, and using the programming model as intended is
| enlightening.
|
| What I do direct it to write a lot is a huge amount of the HEEX
| stuff for me. With an eventual pass over and clean it up for me.
| I have not memorized all of the nuances of CSS and html. I do not
| want to. And writing it has got to be the worst syntactic
| experience in the history of programming. It's like someone said
| people lisp was cool; rather than just gobs of nested
| parentheses, let's double, nay triple, no quadruple down on that.
| We'll bracket all our statements/elements with a PAIR of hard to
| type characters, and for funsies, we'll make them out different
| words in there. And then when it came to years of how to express
| lists of things, it's like someone said "gimme a little bit of
| ini, case insensitivity, etc". And every year, we'll publish new
| spec of new stuff that preserves the old while adding the new. I
| digress...
|
| I view agentic coding as an indictment on how bad programming has
| gotten. I'm not saying there wouldn't be value, but a huge amount
| of the appeal, is that web tech is like legalese filled with what
| are probably hidden bugs that are swallowed by browsers in a
| variety of u predictable ways. What a surprise that we've given
| up and decided the key tools do the probabilistic right thing.
| It's not like we had a better chance of being any more correctly
| precise on our own anyway.
| Sytten wrote:
| I am probably doing something wrong but I hate agents for coding.
| I like the autocomplete and the prompt to generate snippets but
| when it starts modifying code in many files so fast all at once,
| tries a bunch of stuff and never know when to stop it pisses me
| off more than anything else. Because most the time if it had
| stopped and let me do the 10% last part it would have been actual
| legit code.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Heyy! Now we know why fly.io was shilling for AI a couple weeks
| ago.
|
| "They are not making money off AI".was the most common response
| to my pointing out they were shilling AI. Feels good to be right.
| lawn wrote:
| Maybe you mean the "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts" blog
| post on fly.io?
|
| Where they have this nugget about plagiarism:
|
| > But if you're a software developer playing this card? Cut me
| a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass.
| No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual
| property.
|
| So I guess if you have concerns about them using any code you
| upload using this tool you can shove it up your ass.
| troad wrote:
| This makes me very uneasy. Not in what it is per se, but in what
| it shows about the direction of Phoenix.
|
| I've been working with Phoenix a lot the last few months, and I
| like it a lot. But I do get the sense that the project suffers
| from wanting to perpetually chase the next new thing, even when
| that comes at the expense of the functional elegance and
| conceptual cohesiveness that I think is Phoenix' main strength.
|
| LiveView is a great example. It's a very neat bit of tech, but
| it's shoe-horned surprisingly awkwardly into Phoenix. There's now
| a live view and non-live view way to do almost everything in
| Phoenix, and each has their own different foibles and edge cases.
| A lot of code needs to work with both (e.g. auth needs to happen
| at both levels, basically), meaning a surprising amount of code
| needs to have two, nearly identical variants: one with
| traditional Plug idioms, and then another using LiveView
| equivalents. Quick little view helpers end up with either
| convoluted 'what mode am I in?' branching, or (more likely) in
| view-mode-dependent wrappers around view-mode-independent
| abstractions. This touches even the simplest helpers (what is the
| current path?) and becomes more cumbersome from there. (And given
| the lack of static analysis for views, it can be non-trivial to
| even find out what is and isn't actually working where.)
|
| Not every website should be a live view (e.g. hiking directions,
| for example), but that is clearly the direction of travel in
| Phoenix. Non-live views get the disparaging moniker 'dead views',
| and the old Phoenix.HTML helpers have been depreciated in favour
| of <.form />-style live components. The generators depend on
| those, plus Tailwind, Hero Icons and (soon) DaisyUI, all fetched
| live from various places on the Internet on build. This tight
| coupling to trendy dependencies will age poorly, and it makes for
| bumpy on-boarding (opinionated and tightly coupled isn't
| necessarily a smoother experience, just a more inflexible one).
|
| So with all of that in mind, while I'm not shocked to see Phoenix
| jump on the vibe coding hype train, I guess I am disappointed.
|
| The revelation that AI is now writing PRs for Phoenix itself is
| not confidence inspiring. I rely on frameworks like Phoenix
| because I don't want to have to think about the core abstractions
| around getting a website to my users; I want to focus on my
| business logic. But implicit in that choice is the assumption
| that someone _is_ thinking about those things. If it 's AI
| pushing out Phoenix updates now, my trust level and willingness
| to rely on this code drops dramatically. I also do not expect
| Phoenix' fraying conceptual cohesiveness to get any better if
| that's the way we're headed.
|
| Phoenix is still an amazing piece of tech, but I wish I felt more
| at ease about its future trajectory.
| itsautomatisch wrote:
| Burnt through some credits pretty quickly. The first few minutes
| of using it felt like a glimpse of what it was supposed to be
| like, but otherwise it spent a lot of time not getting basic
| things right with the UI and before I knew it I was done. Roughly
| 90 minutes for $20 it's not a good value when you can ostensibly
| have the same experience on your computer and have control over
| every aspect. I still can't clone the latest revised version of
| the codebase it created to my local computer. Between that and
| Fly's non-existent documentation, no usage meter of some kind,
| and the lack of unpaid support (even though I am paying to use
| the service?) makes me want to avoid Fly, which is unfortunate
| because I think it does a lot of things right, especially the
| tunneling and dev experience outside of phoenix.new.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| I love everything I read about Phoenix. It's definitely the
| framework I'm going to use the next time I need to scratch an
| itch.
|
| Having a full stack that is easy to use as a learning sandbox is
| incredibly helpful in that regard, so this looks amazing.
| liampulles wrote:
| This is very cool! I will say though, my spidey senses kick in
| when looking at stuff like this, and make me wonder about how
| much I'm going to get vendored in here. Could I use it develop a
| site off fly.io? If the answer is no, then I'd say this is cool
| and I think useful for people who need something quick and simple
| and out of the box, but not something I would ever use on a
| serious production project.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It's just producing Elixir/Phoenix code that is stored in
| GitHub and can be deployed anywhere.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The answer is yes. What would you say then?
|
| There's a "clone Git repo" thing in the left side bar, use that
| to clone the project locally, mix deps.get, mix phx.serve and
| you're up. You can deploy this anywhere you want.
| kuon wrote:
| I really wish I could move to those nice new editors, but as a
| vim user I just feel paralyzed when I cannot use vim bindings.
| And all "emulations" I tried are just incomplete.
| timeinput wrote:
| I'm with you. I'm going to try Zed in the next couple days
| based on the response to my comment here.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322560 . I'm stuck with
| vim. My fingers nearly only work vim, but I managed to move to
| neovim, which worked. Maybe (something else) can work too.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You can pull the repo, tweak it locally with Vim, push it back
| and ask the LLM to work on top of that. No need to use the
| built in IDE if you don't like it.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| My primary concern with Phoenix is how bad it performs in LLMs
| and I basically went back to Node/React/Rails for LLMs.
|
| This is very exciting and I'll check it out!
| josefrichter wrote:
| What you mean by performs bad in LLMs?
| artur_makly wrote:
| For us SaaS Founders, GrowthHackers, Product folks, us non-devs..
| What are some solid use-cases for it today?
| colecut wrote:
| I am a long time php dev who has been interested in learning
| elixir/phoenix for a while but never quite motivated enough.
|
| I saw this and thought, if this doesn't get me to give it a go,
| nothing will.
|
| Less than 45 minutes after signing up for fly.io, I have a multi-
| room tic tac toe game deployed.
|
| https://tic-tac-toe-cyber.fly.dev/
|
| I had it build the game, opting for a single room at first to see
| if that worked. Then I had it add multiple rooms on a different
| git branch in case that didn't work. It worked great.
|
| I learned very little about elixir, phoenix, or deploying to
| fly.io up to this point, and I already have a nice looking app
| deployed and running.
|
| I know a lot of devs will hate that this is possible, and it is
| up to me now to look at the steps it took to create this and
| really understand what is happening, which are broken down
| extremely simply for me...
|
| I will do this because I want to learn. I bet a lot of people
| won't bother to do that. But those people never would have had
| apps in the first place and now they can. If they are creating
| fun experiences and not banking apps, I think that is still
| great.
|
| You guys have been releasing amazing things for years only to be
| poorly replicated in other languages years later.. but you really
| outdid yourselves here.
|
| I'm blown away.
|
| edit: is there a way to see how much of my credits were used by
| building this?
| jonahx wrote:
| Was the graphic design created from prompts too? It's
| surprisingly nice, especially considering you spent 45 minutes
| on it.
| colecut wrote:
| I told it that I wanted a two player tic tac toe game.
|
| it give me a selection of "styles" and I chose neon retro.. I
| probably could have been more creative and typed in my own
| suggestion.
|
| Other than that, I said absolutely nothing about how I wanted
| the layout.
|
| It came up with the idea of listing all active games on the
| homepage, with the number of players in each, all on its own.
|
| I went from "I want a two player tic tac toe game" to having
| one, and then added multiple rooms, and deployed it all in
| under 45 minutes, with little input other than that..
| asmodeuslucifer wrote:
| Well of course I have to test it.
|
| Disabled on news.ycombinator.com
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