Elixir and AI: Developing Web Apps with Gen-AI at SpawnFest

Christopher Miller delivers a talk detailing his team's participation in SpawnFest 2023, a hackathon centered around Beam languages such as Erlang and Elixir. Working together over 48 hours, they developed a project called 'elmpark,' aimed at synthesizing web applications using AI. Miller elaborates on their initial concept, which involved using text descriptions to generate Elm code with the help of ChatGPT or similar models. The talk includes the challenges they faced, such as handling Git issues, setting up the Elixir environment, and integrating with the Elm compiler. They also had to overcome limitations in ChatGPT's coding capabilities by refining prompts and engineering solutions to reduce hallucinations. The session concludes with a demonstration of their project and lessons learned during the hackathon.