15 Elixir Libraries I Reach For in 2026
The Hex packages I install on day one of a new Elixir project in 2026 — what each earns its place doing, and the ones I dropped along the way.
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Writing · Tag
7 posts on Elixir. Or browse the full writing index →
The Hex packages I install on day one of a new Elixir project in 2026 — what each earns its place doing, and the ones I dropped along the way.
Every AI agent framework runs the same loop: observe, decide, act, repeat. Here it is in 50 lines of Elixir — no framework, just a GenServer.
You don't need a vector database — the Postgres you already run does RAG fine. The hand-rolled pgvector path in Phoenix, and when Arcana earns its place.
Go won the agent daemon and Python owns the reasoning — but the layer nobody claimed is the one that bites you: thousands of long-lived, stateful, crash-prone agents you must keep alive. That's the BEAM's home turf.
A Tencent benchmark across 20 languages found Elixir at the top of LLM code-completion rates — Claude Opus 4 hit 80.3% on Elixir vs 74.9% on C#. The reasons aren't an accident; they're the same boring properties that have always made Elixir pleasant, now compounded by AI.
async/await and goroutines solve scheduling. The BEAM solves failure. Why most concurrency pain is actually failure-isolation pain — and only the actor model plus supervision trees fix it.
We started with ten Ruby and Elixir services serving real-time messaging for 450K students across 900+ universities. Two years later we had six, fully Elixir, and on-call alerts had halved. The migration order, the patterns we leaned on, and what I'd do differently today.