Elixir blogger ends exploratory writing, citing LLM-driven collapse of discussion
Ending my elixir exploratory writing
Lucas Sifoni, an Elixir developer and telescope enthusiast, is ending his three-and-a-half-year blog series of exploratory Elixir and BEAM experiments. He still champions the BEAM platform, arguing that even small companies can benefit from it, but he no longer finds value in publicly documenting his creative coding process. He observes that LLMs now generate most code in volume, discussion has collapsed, and open-source often means a solo developer regenerating everything from scratch. He is disturbed by machine-written blogs and even community members letting AI handle their interactions, and he refuses to feed his ideation and imagination to "the beast." He will continue writing on other subjects.
What I don’t find making sense anymore is the practice of publicly digging a programming-related subject with the bit of creativity that came with the joy of research.
- sarreph
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!
- sodapopcan
> 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!
- sheafification
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.
- astro-lizard
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.
- chantepierre
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.