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About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than most, it’s stable, it has an opinionated architecture built into the language which causes most code bases to be very similar to one another

katemaster009 3mo ago
Fair point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I would still hesitate if the ecosystem isn't moving forward.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
On that note, because of AI I've been more into music, bought a midi keyboard, got real DAW software setup. I've also finally built more and more with Rust, and have been reading more Rust docs. LLMs should never be an excuse not to learn the things you're using it for, those are the bad engineers. An LLM affords me the time to research and learn what it gave me so I can maintain it. It's easier to prompt about the problem if you understand it.
- yonaguska 3mo ago
  If you have a blog or something anywhere, I'm very interested in your journey.
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    I do though I havent been blogging as much, its a blessing and a curse to have a SSG based blog. I would love to have an SSG engine that I can use remotely from anywhere, currently using Publii. https://giancarlostoro.com https://giancarlostoro.com
- eddd-ddde 3mo ago
  This is very similar to my recent experience! LLMs are surprisingly effective at helping you learn the "vibes" of making music and understanding various concepts.
rapind 3mo ago
Maybe it's improved, but I was very disappointed to find agents constantly tripping over significant white space with Elm (Claude Code). Always struck me as strange since they are very proficient with python... and Elm has been one of the most stable modern languages (so stable that people complain about it never changing!). I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved.
- auslegung 3mo ago
  I started working with Elm in production again about a year ago and have bounced back and forth between codex and Claude code and haven’t noticed whitespace problems, so I would conclude it’s better but of course your mileage may vary
  - rapind 3mo ago
    I was already working with elm (have been since Signals) and I was very disappointed in what agents (CC) produced. In contrast, I was pleased with the Rust code they produced.
- rupertlssmith 3mo ago
  LLMs are way past that, Claude Code can very competently write Elm code now, for example.
  - rapind 3mo ago
    Good to know. I built https://github.com/pairshaped/hypertea https://github.com/pairshaped/hypertea to get some of Elm's safety in typescript while being easy for LLMs to use (this is basically just hyperapp in TS, with added elm-like guardrails). Maybe I'll go back to Elm now that LLMs are handling it better.
- rgoulter 3mo ago
  > I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved. I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov. If it's improved? My experience with Nickel-lang (probably as not-in-training-data as Elm) is coding agents have improved with this compared to last time I tried.
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hollowturtle 3mo ago
> I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se
- RussianCow 3mo ago
  That's not why Elm is an ideal language for LLMs: it's because, if it compiles, it's most likely working software. Agentic workflows have gotten significantly better over the last year, so LLMs using languages like Elm, Haskell, or even Rust have an amazing feedback loop where even lower quality models can keep trying until things compile.
  - hollowturtle 3mo ago
    can keep failing til you're tired of having the agent running in loops, as I said it doesn't matter, agent tools are more effective with models trained with a lot of elm examples
    - fpoling 3mo ago
      Yet Elm due to its simplicity does not need a lot of examples. Language itself is small and blessed way to architecture things consist of few patterns. Then things are composable. This is ideal for LLMs. The price for that is verbosity. What in other languages are hidden behind async and complicated libraries in Elm has to be done explicitly resulting in boilerplate. But that is never a problem for LLMs. Then Elm compiler has one of the best error messages. This helps agents a lot. Then Time Machine debugger is another big help for agents as they have access to the full execution trace of the program. The trace is much smaller than would be necessary for other languages and typically fits into content window.
      - hollowturtle 3mo ago
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katemaster009 3mo ago

Fair point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I would still hesitate if the ecosystem isn't moving forward.

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

On that note, because of AI I've been more into music, bought a midi keyboard, got real DAW software setup. I've also finally built more and more with Rust, and have been reading more Rust docs. LLMs should never be an excuse not to learn the things you're using it for, those are the bad engineers. An LLM affords me the time to research and learn what it gave me so I can maintain it. It's easier to prompt about the problem if you understand it.

yonaguska 3mo ago
If you have a blog or something anywhere, I'm very interested in your journey.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  I do though I havent been blogging as much, its a blessing and a curse to have a SSG based blog. I would love to have an SSG engine that I can use remotely from anywhere, currently using Publii. https://giancarlostoro.com https://giancarlostoro.com
eddd-ddde 3mo ago
This is very similar to my recent experience! LLMs are surprisingly effective at helping you learn the "vibes" of making music and understanding various concepts.

rapind 3mo ago

Maybe it's improved, but I was very disappointed to find agents constantly tripping over significant white space with Elm (Claude Code). Always struck me as strange since they are very proficient with python... and Elm has been one of the most stable modern languages (so stable that people complain about it never changing!). I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved.

auslegung 3mo ago
I started working with Elm in production again about a year ago and have bounced back and forth between codex and Claude code and haven’t noticed whitespace problems, so I would conclude it’s better but of course your mileage may vary
- rapind 3mo ago
  I was already working with elm (have been since Signals) and I was very disappointed in what agents (CC) produced. In contrast, I was pleased with the Rust code they produced.
rupertlssmith 3mo ago
LLMs are way past that, Claude Code can very competently write Elm code now, for example.
- rapind 3mo ago
  Good to know. I built https://github.com/pairshaped/hypertea https://github.com/pairshaped/hypertea to get some of Elm's safety in typescript while being easy for LLMs to use (this is basically just hyperapp in TS, with added elm-like guardrails). Maybe I'll go back to Elm now that LLMs are handling it better.
rgoulter 3mo ago
> I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved. I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov. If it's improved? My experience with Nickel-lang (probably as not-in-training-data as Elm) is coding agents have improved with this compared to last time I tried.

deleted 3mo ago

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hollowturtle 3mo ago

> I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se

RussianCow 3mo ago
That's not why Elm is an ideal language for LLMs: it's because, if it compiles, it's most likely working software. Agentic workflows have gotten significantly better over the last year, so LLMs using languages like Elm, Haskell, or even Rust have an amazing feedback loop where even lower quality models can keep trying until things compile.
- hollowturtle 3mo ago
  can keep failing til you're tired of having the agent running in loops, as I said it doesn't matter, agent tools are more effective with models trained with a lot of elm examples
  - fpoling 3mo ago
    Yet Elm due to its simplicity does not need a lot of examples. Language itself is small and blessed way to architecture things consist of few patterns. Then things are composable. This is ideal for LLMs. The price for that is verbosity. What in other languages are hidden behind async and complicated libraries in Elm has to be done explicitly resulting in boilerplate. But that is never a problem for LLMs. Then Elm compiler has one of the best error messages. This helps agents a lot. Then Time Machine debugger is another big help for agents as they have access to the full execution trace of the program. The trace is much smaller than would be necessary for other languages and typically fits into content window.
    - hollowturtle 3mo ago

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