Ending my elixir exploratory writing | Hacker News Reader

Ending my elixir exploratory writing

lucassifoni.info

74 pointsffin46 comments

The most enlightening experience I had from programming was picking up Elixir for Advent of Code[0] 3 years ago. At that point in my career, I knew what I was doing and had built various apps and systems. TypeScript and React was my safe-space, but which I often committed the sin of over engineering things to be as functional as possible in.

I'd tried Go, which I didn't really like because it was too imperative for my taste and also required you to write every... single... thing you needed from scratch. (Not trying to start a flame war here -- it's just how I felt using it).

One of my engineers was kind of obsessed with Elixir (he was / is extremely smart) and he convinced me to give it a go over Christmas break. It really was the functional Valhalla he had made it out to be. I felt like I'd finally found a language that "got" how I wanted to approach writing code. Unfortunately, startup life got in the way, and I was hardly going to suggest an Elixir rewrite (well, I did try, but anyway).

I'm planning on re-approaching Elixir, as a haven to write code as a human. I still use LLMs for writing code pretty much daily, but if you're looking for something that's different and fun, I would recommend checking it out. It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!

[0] - https://adventofcode.com/

It's probably the language that punches the furthest above it's weight in community size vs. what you can do with it (and what is being done with it professionally), and I don't think it's even close really. The quality and capability and breadth of libraries people publish is really incredible, from web all the way down to embedded.

What did you need to write with golang? I found the exact opposite effect when I tested elixir and then went to go.

Exlixir has a great std lib but fewer packages than I'd like in the community. I can't even recall what I wanted!

With go the std lib seems bigger (although very lacking in some data structures) but the third party packages are incredible.

I also find both languages similarly useful since I was mostly interested in sane concurrent primitives in a lang. The OTP is not that useful to me since I haven't had to run these services in anything close to serious but you can (kinda) take the OTP to other languages (they're principles after all).

> What did you need to write with golang?

This is a great follow-up that I don't have a satisfactory answer for, because I can't really recall. I _think_ I was trying to do something with Firebase w/ high parallelism using goroutines. I just remember the feeling of imperativeness when I was iterating through results, etc, and not having a built-in mapping function.

Elixir was totally different -- was just scratching an "intellectual" itch, and it fit my needs like a glove in terms of feeling.

I'm confident that I could learn to like Go, though, lots of people I know rave about it.

> The OTP is not that useful to me

Also agree, didn't really get into OTP even, just enjoyed the style and structure of the language itself!

Well the irony is that Claude is very good at writing Elixir ;)

> It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!

Want to clarify for others reading that the author of _Elixir_ isn't stopping, just the author of this post. José has been shockingly responsive on recent issue/pr threads I've posted on Elixir-related repos recently, often same day. They also don't seem to use any bot-based code review, which is incredibly refreshing in contrast to many other repos[1] in 2026 (Sorry for the callout, it's just such a good example). Elixir projects have been a joy as a fairly new contributor, compared to other ecosystems.

[1] https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/pull/13188

> discussion has collapsed

I used to be extremely active on Elixir Forum. It was the main place I would interact with people online, and HN was a bit of a distant second. Now HN usage has spiked a bit and I now have a... ugh... reddit account. There is still some decent discussion there, but it's largely library announcements (many vibe coded), some blog posts (that are often about AI), and news posts. Questions about the language itself have, unsurprisingly, pretty much completely halted. I think around a month ago someone asked a syntax question -- it was a bit of a jump scare!

It doesn't help that the default page changed from the form to whatever the fuck it is now that requires multiple steps to see comments.

I'm not a huge fan of the changes myself, but discussion collapse was in full effect before the change (and had started happening long before it). But ya, I think I agree that it doesn't help. The change was made in good faith in order to try and boost it, but I can't objectively say if it's good or not since I always skip and go straight to forums.elixirforum.com now. My biggest annoyance is that I now have to type `fo<enter>` instead of `e<enter>` in my address bar to get there.

I agree in general, but I suspect that the change adds friction to commenting in a way that is counter productive.

I still have no idea how to use that abomination of a page. Any obvious clicks lead to some weird states and places that are completely unobvious.

I need to get to the list of topics in a forum, or to comments on a post damnit

I'd complain over there but it's historically been pointless.

Second this, some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a long time and a classical example of why you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the new default page is absolutely horrible in terms of usability.

I've noticed less comments on posts, but this is probably also the result of more AI-assisted Elixir projects being announced, not just the change in UI/UX.

Hey, post author here, just to say that I've appreciated your presence on the forum a lot since I started using Elixir. You are one of those who brought a warm tone there :)

Oh Lucas! Ha, I searched your name on the forum before even reading the article but did so hastily, a thread for a talk which I guess you commented on came up, and I thought you were the guy from the talk and was like, "Nope, don't know him" and closed the page.

Anyway, thanks, and back at you, and hi, and nice article :)

It was a nice place pre-LLMs. One of the better communities imo.

I think so, though I didn't spend any near that amount of time on other language forums, though I guess that's saying something. It's cool having José, Chris, and other big community leaders participate often. Same goes for frequent participating from the Erlang core team, in fact I think it got to the point where we'd hear from them even more often!

But ya, was a fun place. I loved reading it, I love helping on it and the more general chats. I even made some friends and found a job through it!

there is a running joke among a part of the community that goes something like "0 days since last persistent workflow orchestration library announcement".

I feel like Elixir community is a bit too nice to call out obvious slop (some folks straight out post LLM-generated blog posts every week or so), so instead we could focus on elevating human effort. Recent Oban release for example had a note that all the docs a human-written. We should praise this!

> there is a running joke among a part of the community that goes something like "0 days since last persistent workflow orchestration library announcement".

Ha, I missed this! I rarely click on any topics anymore, but I have noticed a trend of similar-sounding libraries being posted. Other than one person whose blog I already read a bit, I don't click on any of the blog posts anymore. It's not a conscious decision, I just open scan the topics, usually nothing looks interesting and a close the tab.

I feel you! I still try to share/comment on human-written posts even if they're not fully up my alley. Pangram extensions helps a lot with that. But yeah, in general it's just crickets and a buzzing noise of tokens floating around

> Pangram extensions

Was not aware of these. Thanks!

Ha, I feel attacked: https://github.com/agoodway/pgflow

^ this one is pretty cool, pgmq does most of the work.

Glad somebody noticed and appreciated that! Human written long form content is extremely important (to us, but I think for the world).

Every single email and issue reply is also 100% human authored. People deserve to interact with humans online, especially when they have reached out for help and real interaction.

Every single time I interact with Oban, it's a delight. Glad to see you guys continuing to put in the work and sticking with human writing.

I've got a production service largely backed by Oban Pro and last month alone it handled running heavy ML tasks against ~200,000 long-form video files. Each analysis has multiple steps, all handled with Oban's dependent jobs feature, so there was something like a million unique jobs, and I don't think we hit a single production issue with Oban. Being able to connect into the cluster and directly manipulate things with Oban is a superpower.

This is very sad, but I came to the same conclusion with my math blogging a couple years back. There’s little point to publishing any personal effort on the internet anymore. At best you get some spam comments and your work stolen by bot scrapers; at worst you get a doxxed and targeted by a harassment campaign.

Oh, wow. I did absolutely not expect to end up on the front page with this one as it was a lot more personal than the rest of my posts... well, now I'm here and will be happy to chat

Edit, for the person whose comment is marked dead under mine and thus I cannot answer to : I was already very wary of publishing packages, because all abandoned packages start with a good intention. Now I will only publish something I depend on and use, and only if it has lived for a few months to years.

Hi there, fellow Elixir blogger there! For me personally the advent of LLMs had the opposite effect: if world is going to be filled with garbage, however bad my writing is, at least it's going to be human. If you ever decide to write again, just know that some people out there still care!

I have come to the same conclusion in my personal technical writing. I am loath to share ideas to the scraper marketplace just to have some executive prompt an LLM 2 years from now and claim the idea for themselves. I am weary of sharing my academic work with a chatbot as well.

"I don't want to share my ideas in case someone might benefit from them" is a strange attitude for an academic.

Sharing ideas involves communication which happens between two or more brains.

Prompted LLLM output only involves brains on the input side, the source training data. Nothing is communicated to the end user brain because they don’t try to understand the output and never had the knowledge or experience necessary to do so if they wanted to.

Academics' primary external recompense is in credit, attribution, and recognition. AI has effectively ended attribution, so I'm not at all surprised people are less interested in sharing and publishing. Especially when anything you publish will just be used to train the next iteration that still won't credit you.

It’s sad that in the face of seeing AI content out there, so many writers are retreating to not feed the beast: it’s a white flag that speeds up the war being won by AI.

We need more human writing, not less.

I hope this trend reverses sometime soon.

I agree that we need more human writing. I will simply stop in-public exploratory programming for the time being.

> We need more human writing, not less.

Per Brandolini's law, genuine writing cannot ever compete with spam. The amount of humans is relatively the same while the ease of generating convincing blogspam has increased by multiple orders of magnitude.

Yours is a nice sentiment, but we have to accept that the Web is pretty much lost.

Unfortunately, I share the sentiment. Although I have been blogging weekly for more than 15 years, I have less and less incentives to share my learnings.

I feel the same, there are still lots of people who are interested in learning internals, but they are hard to reach. Even such people don't use Google anymore, so they won't find your content.

Years before gen AI took off, when I wrote internet-facing prose or code, I thought "even if nobody reads this, maybe some AI will read it some day and find it useful, so I should still make it accurate", never expecting such a day to come so soon.

Now that it has, I'm overjoyed that my work has had some tiny part in training the models that are helping millions of people implement their tech ideas or even just write some text.

"The machine superintelligence learned from your ideas" is awesome sci-fi, not a reason for pearl-clutching. To stop publishing purely because you don't want AI to learn from you is misguided at best and misanthropic at worst.

I am neutral about having maybe contributed to the weights. What would be misguided in my opinion would be to force myself to continue writing those (partly pointless, I agree) little programming explorations without the pleasure of doing so. So much efficiency and siloing of individuals has been created in programming in recent times that I doubt the point.

But to me there's a strong difference between programming and non-programming things re: AI. I don't feel the same way about any other subject to write about.

It's not about wanting to keep things for myself in an ownership sense.

That's not what he's saying. He was doing this writing to communicate with other human beings, and that since that seems seemingly has died off in his community there isn't much point in continuing that.

It's great that there are people that enjoy being a training bot for a corporate product, but some people still want to talk to other people. And if a system ever becomes an AGI, I am fairly sure it will no longer need any human input, so our days as training bots are likely numbered. Enjoy it while you can I guess.

> It's great that there are people that enjoy being a training bot for a corporate product

FWIW I feel more or less the same _and_ I think this gives society a solid ground for demanding some sort of collective compensation from AI labs, just like mining or oil companies pay for natural resources https://distantprovince.substack.com/p/the-past-is-a-natural...

But I don't want to train the machine superintelligence. In fact, I am fundamentally against the creation of superintelligent machines.

You do you, of course, but don't call it pearl-clutching if people have different worldviews.

Mixing of actual underlined text and hyperlinked text with the same underline should actually be criminal. I hope the author has installed heatmaps.

Whoops. I'm truly sorry for this one indeed, I will revert it. I bought actual font licenses but did not choose an italic yet, and replaced it with underlines, but this of course conflicts with my links..

> There even are in the elixir community a few people letting Claude borrow their name and profile picture while handling all interactions. I won’t name them here but I find this very unsettling. I don’t blame them directly

Why not name them? These are people who no longer want to communicate with other people. They should be named and shamed. All their fake-interactions they do via LLMs should be made obvious at all times. That way real humans can instantly avoid these clowns.

Well (post author here), being solo and thus sometimes feeling pressured for "relevance" since relevance is tied to livelihood, I understand that some people facing this weird era can go that far.

I even feel my own writing has changed after reading claude-speak for a dozen months now.

If those people never "come back", yes, I'll have a more permanent opinion on them

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