The State of Career Growth in Elixir with Bruce Tate

In this episode, Elixir Wizards Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Bruce Tate, founder of Groxio and longtime Elixir educator, to discuss career growth and mentorship in the age of AI.

Bruce reflects on Elixir’s evolution and explores how AI coding agents are changing the way developers learn, work, and advance. He explains his “anti-vibe coding” philosophy and recommends practices for maintaining code quality, arguing that many struggles attributed to junior developers are really failures of training and mentorship.

Rather than using AI productivity gains to eliminate entry-level roles, Bruce challenges teams to reinvest that time in educating juniors to support their long-term career path.

Bruce will expand on this conversation at ElixirConf 2026, September 10–11 in Chicago, and the Elixir Wizards will be there too! Join us and the broader Elixir community, and use promo code Elixirwizards for 10% off in-person or virtual tickets at https://elixirconf.com/

Topics discussed in this episode:

• The evolution of the Elixir ecosystem from conception to now
• Rethinking career growth and mentorship in the age of AI
• What “anti-vibe coding” means
• Functional core and imperative shell design
• OTP fundamentals and architectural literacy
• Managing AI-generated code and pull requests
• Mentorship beyond code review
• Developing engineering judgment
• API design as a core skill
• AI as a force multiplier for junior developers
• Reinvesting AI productivity gains in people

Links mentioned:

https://grox.io/
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate https://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks/
Programming Phoenix LiveView https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liveview/
BASIC Programming Language https://www.purebasic.com/
C++ Programming Language https://cplusplus.com/
COBOL Programming Language https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/cobol
Fortran Programming Language https://fortran-lang.org/
Bitter Java by Bruce Tate https://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Java-Bruce-Tate/dp/193011043X
Slashdot Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
Slashdot https://slashdot.org/
Java Programming Language https://www.java.com/en/
Ruby Programming Language https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Lisp Programming Language https://lisp-lang.org/
Haskell Programming Language https://www.haskell.org/
Erlang Programming Language https://www.erlang.org/
Eric Meadows-Jönsson https://github.com/ericmj
Machine Learning in Elixir by Sean Moriarity https://pragprog.com/titles/smelixir/machine-learning-in-elixir/
The AI Collective https://www.aicollective.com/
Elixir Pipe Operator https://operator.hexdocs.pm/readme.html
Phoenix Framework https://www.phoenixframework.org/
Phoenix LiveView https://phoenix-live-view.hexdocs.pm/Phoenix.LiveView.html
Broadway https://hex.pm/packages/broadway
Designing Elixir Systems with OTP by James Edward Gray & Bruce Tate https://pragprog.com/titles/jgotp/designing-elixir-systems-with-otp/
The AI Coding Crisis Blog Series https://grox.io/blog/series/the-ai-coding-crisis/
Groxio Live https://grox.io/live

Special Guest: Bruce Tate.