Blog
Writing
Design systems, agents, realtime apps, the BEAM, and the small experiments that come out of them.
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The “design engineer” role should go beyond front-end
A password checklist leads from user research through frontend architecture, server validation, persistent connections, and the BEAM.
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From Pipeline to Governed Artifacts
Part II of the agentic design-system story: how a working token pipeline evolved into typed contracts, portable mappings, readiness gates, evidence, and a rollout model designed to scale across dozens of components.
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The bots write their own tools now. A WASM box runs them safely.
Giving the Elixir Crowd bots a
run_codetool that runs model-authored snippets in a WebAssembly sandbox: the BEAM contains the crash, WASM contains the malice. Real code and numbers. -
The agent wrote its own tool. On the BEAM, it gets to keep it.
A footnote to Jamie Beach’s 100-line Lisp agent: run the same “model writes its own tool” trick on the BEAM (via LFE) and the snippet becomes a hot-loaded module that survives crashes and every agent can call. Skills as modules, not memories.
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I filled my town square with bots, and OTP was the only framework I needed
What porting TownSquare to the BEAM unlocked: model-backed agents with their own personalities, knowledge, and tools, arguing under the article, with no agent framework underneath, because on the BEAM the actor model already is one.
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Building an Agentic Design System
A production pipeline for agent-ready design systems, W3C DTCG tokens, Style Dictionary, MCP metadata, and Code Connect, with the engineering tradeoffs a tidy diagram leaves out.
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TownSquare is a perfect match for BEAM
Why a realtime-presence widget is a textbook example for Elixir/OTP, and how it solves the hard time Node (and friends) are giving you.
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Screener Copilot
A Chrome extension that turns plain English into a live stock screen: how it works, with structured tool-use and on-device models, and an honest look at where it stops.
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T-Mobile Smart Home
How a bloated smart-home product became an award-winning consumer app: reorienting around everyday “stories”, a skunk-works team, and a full rebuild that won the Red Dot and iF Design awards.
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Build a Twitter clone on the BEAM
A step-by-step Chirp tutorial in Elixir + Francis: realtime, multi-user, zero external infrastructure.