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Stack

Phoenix + LiveView, Ecto/PostgreSQL, vanilla JavaScript (no frontend framework), and the Claude API for DylanBot in production (a local Ollama model in development). See This Platform for the full architecture writeup.

Why Phoenix/LiveView for the live parts

The interactive pieces (the DylanBot chat widget, the live "thinking…" indicator, and especially the agent chat takeover) are where choosing Elixir/Phoenix paid off:

• LiveView renders the UI on the server and pushes only diffs down a WebSocket, so the chat widget, ticket workspace, and support desk are fully interactive with almost no hand-written frontend state. The state lives in an Elixir process, not scattered across client-side JavaScript.
• Phoenix PubSub powers the live takeover: when an agent takes over a conversation, a single broadcast on "conversation:<id>" reaches both the visitor's widget and the agent's ticket page and re-renders them in real time, across two separate browser sessions, with no external message broker to run (PubSub ships inside the app's supervision tree).
• The BEAM's process model makes the slow LLM call cheap to handle: every connection is its own lightweight process, and each reply is generated in a separate task that messages back when it's done, so the socket stays responsive during the 15–20s wait instead of blocking. These processes are isolated, so one failing chat can't take the others down.

It's the kind of workload the BEAM was built for. Ericsson designed Erlang for telecom, where you have lots of concurrent, long-lived, low-latency connections, so a chat-and-ticketing app running on persistent sockets fits it well.

Design system: "Dark Arcade"

A dark, high-contrast theme built on CSS custom properties: a near-black background, a single yellow accent used sparingly, and status colors reserved for actual status (ok/warn/danger/info). Two pixel display fonts (Press Start 2P for headings and nav, VT323 for terminal-style copy) sit on top of Inter for body text. Pixel fonts are decoration, never paragraph copy, so the docs stay readable. Square corners everywhere, hard 3px pixel-shadow on headings, and every animated effect respects prefers-reduced-motion.

An honest note on Elixir and Phoenix

Picking Elixir/Phoenix was deliberate. Dylan wanted to learn a new language for this build, and instead of reaching for a familiar stack, he went with one whose strengths in soft real-time, concurrency, and WebSockets fit what a live chat-and-support tool needs. So the site is what it looks like: a project he learned the stack by building, not a claim to have known it beforehand. See Languages and Frameworks for more on that.