About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than most, it’s stable, it has an opinionated architecture built into the language which causes most code bases to be very similar to one another
I wrote a thing in 2023 about why I'm still using Elm:
It's 2026, and I'm still using Elm for all the same reasons :)
As an added bonus, Claude seems to play very very nicely with Elm:
Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.
The project was dead. The previous release was 7 years ago, where it stopped because the creator (same as author of this announcement) stopped maintaining it and since the community hasn't progress beyond a BDFL-model that's where it died.
So it was dead, it just now has been resurrected (and AFAIK with a whithered community in the meantime).
your definition of dead is elms definition of stability, I think :D haha
javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness
Same, I basically assumed the community around it had died out. But i guess the sole maintainer/creator is still around.
I never used elm except for doing a tutorial, but lately I've built a full stack gleam app (using coding agents for the most part, with a lot of control in the beginning on the structure of the code) and have found that process works quite well
I'm glad it's back. Elm had such a remarkable elegance I was always rooting for it.
wow careful, this turkey still has some kick left in it!
I know right. I’m glad DSLs have fallen out of fashion. Just use the platform.
There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.
Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.
Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.
I remember using Elm in one of my gigs. After I left, the client hated me. Not to forget all the drama that it had before Covid. I really want this language to succeed, but its bdfl is trying hard....
used elm between 2016-17.
it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm.
sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.
> ... and others are more visible features like equatable and hashable types.
I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.
love it see it :)
What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?
Stronger foundation (as to mean better tested), less accidental complexity of reinventing everything, transferability of knowledge, easier onboarding and review of changes.
Your argument is a mirror of the snark question "why don't LLMs write in assembly?" for those not looking at the output at all.
The point is the same as in pre-LLM.
If anything, LLMs make it easier to choose from a broad set of options. The tradeoffs are the same as pre-LLM days, but the learning curve is more favorable.
Professional diligence, perhaps? A desire to not be blindly led into the kind of narrow, often first-party stack which is so often proposed by Claude Code?
With all due respect, not everyone is afflicted with the lack of care sufficient to allow them to launch vibe coded apps as low quality as https://podnami.com. Considered technology choices are one such aspect of the practice of caring about what you're building.
I haven't tried it, but Elm might be a really good fit for LLMs, because it forbids taking shortcuts.