José Valim on Tidewave

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I chat with Elixir creator José Valim about Tidewave, the AI coding agent that lives inside your web framework. José shares the journey from falling in love with MCP to discovering its limitations, and how Tidewave solves the copy-paste problem that plagues AI-assisted development.

We explore how Tidewave integrates directly with your browser to eliminate tedious workflows, automatically detecting exceptions and validating changes without manual intervention. José explains why the tool now supports Phoenix, Rails, Django, FastAPI, Flask, and Next.js, and how building one feature benefits all frameworks simultaneously. The conversation covers prompting strategies, context management, and the unique challenges of building Tidewave with Tidewave.

José offers candid insights on why MCP has fundamental limitations for user experience, the security concerns around AI agents, and why Elixir's message-passing architecture makes it ideal for building agentic systems. We discuss the evolving type system in Elixir, code review workflows with AI, and the upcoming Tidewave features including multi-element inspection and symbol search.

The episode concludes with José's perspective on transitioning from open source maintainer to product owner, collecting user feedback through Discord, and exciting developments with Tauri for building desktop applications with Elixir. This conversation provides valuable insights for developers interested in AI-powered tooling and the future of web development.

Resources Mentioned:
- Code Benchmark: https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark

Connect with José:
- X: https://x.com/josevalim
- Tidewave: https://tidewave.ai
- Dashbit: https://dashbit.co

SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com