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.

Chris is a hacker’s hacker.

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!

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.

Very cool. Does it use Phoenix 7 or 8 in the video?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What LLM does Phoenix.new use?

"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"?

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.

Integrating AI assistance directly into an Elixir IDE could boost productivity, especially for newcomers. Excited to see how remote SSH and local workflows develop!

Why wouldn't LLMs work as well with Elixir as python or JS? LLMs don't parse an AST.

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?

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

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!

What model is it using for all the agentic work?

What usage limits do we get with the $20 monthly price?

Thank you!