The Workflow Is the Point 🔁

After about a week of tinkering with Claude wired into my Elixir/Phoenix workflow, I’ve stopped asking whether AI coding assistants “work.”

They do.

The more interesting question has been whether my workflow works.

Most of the work I had to do to get all this working wasn’t about prompt phrasing. It was mechanical. Environment variables. Access rights. Basic issues with running something inside a VM.

• Can the assistant run the test suite.
• Does it understand the difference between a failing test and a broken environment.
• Can it see compiler warnings and static analysis output.

Until that foundation was solid, there was no real way for it to validate its work or iterate responsibly.

Once tests were reliable, the shape of the workflow became obvious.

• Start with a clean baseline. All tests passing.
• Read existing tests to understand current behavior.
• Add failing tests for the new behavior.
• Implement in small steps.
  • One small change.
  • Validate with tests.
  • Adjust the plan if necessary.
  • Repeat.

It’s not a special AI workflow. It’s just disciplined development.

The assistant benefits from the same things a junior engineer would: A well-defined plan, incremental change, and visible feedback loops.

Adding Dialyzer earlier in the process quietly reinforced this. When touching a file, check for existing warnings. Clean up the obvious issues. Dead code. Unused variables. Small type problems.

Larger structural issues get their own ticket. Small ones get fixed inline, as long as they don’t expand the scope.

Over time, the ignored warnings start to disappear without scheduling a dedicated cleanup sprint.

The biggest changes I've noticed so far haven't been like  "wow, AI is writing code for me" it's been more about drastic improvements to my workflow. I'm resolving issues faster while also increasing code coverage and code reliability. 

Hard to complain.

But most of it comes down to something less exciting than the use of AI itself: A solid plan, a tight feedback loop, and the discipline to follow both.