Live data from Hacker News

Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

fly.io

91–100 of 283 posts

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#91

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.

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#92

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.

How tightly coupled to Fly.io are generated apps?

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#93
post #65

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.

the ai agent runs inside the same remote runtime as the app. does it share the BEAM vm or run as a port process?

The agent runs outside your IDE instance and controls/communicates with it over Phoenix channels

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#94
post #66

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.

how are they isolating ai agent state from app-level processes without breaking BEAM's supervision guarantees?

They run on separate machines and your agent just controls the remote runtime when it needs to interact with the system/write/read/etc

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#95

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.

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#96
post #78

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?

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#97

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.

How tightly coupled to Fly.io are generated apps?

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#98
post #81

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.

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…

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#99

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.

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.

Re: Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

#100
post #29
post #21

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.

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…

Neither of them are official which is often a non starter for some large enterprise customers.
Post reply on HN