Ending my elixir exploratory writing

I’ve started this log 3 and a half years ago with experiment-like articles in Elixir related to simulating a telescope, which became my off-work practice for a while (in addition of being already invested in optics building), brought me to a few conferences, and allowed to meet people who became actual friends. It was not my first (nor my last) collection of articles online.

Writing here, first about things done with elixir, then about things the Erlang virtual machine can do was a great way to balance my current era of professionnal and personal programming. I still believe the BEAM is a great platform and that despite being often advertised for high scale, it will be critical to recognize that no company is too small to benefit from it. The BEAM is also a platform subtle enough to keep learning for years and I encourage everyone to dig in.

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. LLMs now write most code in volume in the communities I know of, discussion has collapsed, and open-source now means “solo developer re-generates everything they need from scratch” in a lot of places (which I talked about in Care over time is the only software success metric now ).

This means that for some, imagination is now the limit. We already see lots of blogs, talks, forum posts, and even github discussions being machine-written, where people succumbed to delegate imagination and voice. 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, these are strange times and it asks everyone to adapt. This process of adapting can take a lot of weird intermediary shapes.

So, since the act of mimicking the development of an idea in prose and code can now be fully hand-waved, do I want to offer the other parts, ideation and imagination, as small as they can be, to be fed to the beast ?

From now on, I do not !

I’ll continue writing on other subjects and eventual elixir non-experimental work.