Blog
Writing
Design systems, agents, realtime apps, the BEAM, and the small experiments that come out of them.
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Full validation loop in contract based agentic design system
Part III of the agentic design-system story. The Button contract now has a Figma library, a React component and a Phoenix component adopting it, and one command checks all three. Drift comes back as a named repair instruction an agent can act on.
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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_code tool that runs model-authored snippets in a WebAssembly sandbox: the BEAM contains the crash, WASM contains the malice. Real code and numbers.
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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 added observability to an agent swarm without adding an SDK to it
A dashboard for the running bot swarm, built by joining its Erlang cluster instead of instrumenting it. The roster, the supervision tree and every bot’s live state needed nothing added to the swarm; the events that leave no trace needed sixteen lines. Where that line falls is the whole argument.
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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.