Roberto Aloi

Erlang DevX @ WhatsApp

Erlang enthusiast, open-source passionate and speaker, Roberto (he/him) has been working with Erlang technologies since 2007.

Sicilian by origin, formerly at Erlang Solutions and Klarna, Roberto is now based in Stockholm where he works as a software engineer at WhatsApp, focusing on Erlang tooling and developer experience.

Main author of the Erlang LS language server, contributor of the ELP project, Roberto is one of the organizers of the Stockholm BEAM meetups.

Talk:
Still Typing Erlang? Developer Experience in the Prompt Era

For decades, the IDE defined the developer experience: code completion, go-to-definition, inline errors, and refactoring tools defined what a great developer experience looked like.

Language servers like ELP (Erlang Language Platform) brought these capabilities to Erlang developers at scale.

But the world is shifting. Developers increasingly write prompts instead of code. In this new paradigm, some features that were once essential become less critical. Meanwhile, new requirements emerge: How do you verify that AI-generated code is correct? How do you grade the output? What role do type checkers, linters, and static analysis play when the code is written by a machine?

This talk explores the evolution of the Erlang developer experience from traditional IDE tooling to AI-assisted workflows.

Whether you’re building developer tools, adopting AI assistants in your Erlang workflow, or curious about where developer experience is heading — this talk offers a framework for thinking about the IDE-to-AI transition.

Key Takeaways:

  • A mental model for how developer tooling evolves in the age of AI - from authoring aids to verification layers
  • How the Erlang ecosystem is adapting to serve AI workflows
  • An understanding of what makes Erlang both challenging and well-suited for AI-assisted development

Target Audience:

  • BEAM developers and tooling maintainers who want to understand how AI-assisted workflows change what developer tools need to do — whether they’re already prompting or still skeptical.