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Vector search for Elixir, powered by ETS and Rust.
~/ elchemista.com
Elchemista: A Builder’s Blog on Elixir, AI, and MVPs
My name is Yuriy Zhar. Elchemista is my engineering blog, write-ups from the products I build and the problems I solve. I ship startup MVPs with Elixir/Phoenix, Go, TypeScript, and AI (LLMs + RAG). Want help building yours? Reach out.
Editor's Picks
Featured Stories
Hand-picked articles that deserve your attention.
Featured
My Thoughts
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5 min read
The world outside, the code inside
With grief and financial worries weighing on me, coding has become a refuge. AI agents do much of the work, but judgment, delegation and ego still matter.
Read Story
Featured
My Thoughts
•
8 min read
I've built so much. And I still feel stuck.
SendVia, Spectre, holons, tomorrow's work. It's all mixed up in my head lately: few replies, lots of ideas, and I still want to build.
Read Story
Featured
My Thoughts
•
6 min read
I want a genie I can take apart
A post on X brought me back to an idea I’ve been pursuing for a while: an intelligence made of parts that can come together when needed, without automatically claiming all the power.
Read Story
Featured
Projects & Work in Progress
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7 min read
I Wanted an AI Agent That Wouldn’t Break Things. I Ended Up Building a Framework
I wanted to build an AI agent for a real project. Somewhere between prompts, policies, and real edge cases, I ended up building an open source framework in Elixir.
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Featured
System Design
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6 min read
Why my Phoenix node “finished loading” but RAM never came back
A hands-on story about tracking down stubborn RAM usage in a Phoenix node after a heavy data load.
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Featured
My Thoughts
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6 min read
Coding With AI Agents Without Losing Your Mind
By using project-specific guides and resetting messy contexts, I focus on building a repeatable system rather than chasing the "best" model.
Read Story
Featured
Projects & Work in Progress
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6 min read
How I Ended Up Building My Own Multi-Domain, AI-Powered Blog Platform
I got tired of cloned WordPress SEO farms, so I built a multi-domain, multi-language blog platform in Elixir with fast SEO-optimized pages, integrated analytics, AdSense, affiliates and AI agents that research trends and draft high-quality articles automatically.
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Featured
Projects & Work in Progress
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3 min read
Yacht & Tours: A Fast, Clean Boat-Booking Platform Built for Real Business Needs
Yacht & Tours is a booking platform I built to make renting boats fast and straightforward.
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Featured
Projects & Work in Progress
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3 min read
Redomap: A Drop-In Map System That Actually Works in the Real World
Redomap is a lightweight, install-free map system you can drop into any website. Users scan a QR code and get maps, audio guides, and navigation instantly.
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Featured
Projects & Work in Progress
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4 min read
Building Arcatech custom CRM
I built a custom CRM using Elixir and Phoenix LiveView that uses AI to identify parts from photos, translate messages, and automate conversations with suppliers over WhatsApp.
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Latest Updates
Fresh from the Blog
Stay up to date with our latest stories, tutorials, and insights.
System Design
5 min
I Built a Vector Engine in Rust. Then I Started Wondering Where Elixir Had Gone.
Why I moved Vettore's canonical records out of Rust and into ETS, what it changed for HNSW recovery, and where binary vector search loses accuracy.
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System Design
4 min
WhatsApp Had Acknowledged the Message. My Client Kept Waiting.
An actual ACK regression, two WhatsApp addressing identities, a priority queue built with Erlang, and the limits of backpressure in a GenServer.
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System Design
5 min
I Wanted an AI-Managed Blog. I Ended Up Using Git as the Database.
Why ExBlog keeps articles in Git and serves them from ETS, and how it handles atomic index replacement and concurrent readers in Phoenix.
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System Design
5 min
I Taught My Agents to Remember. The Hard Part Was Keeping Deleted Memories from Coming Back.
Tombstones, append-only memories, physical deletion and an erasure-fence regression test for concurrent writes in Spectre Mnemonic.
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My Thoughts
5 min
I Went to a Tourism Trade Show. And Came Home to Build a Galaxy.
At TTG in Rimini, AI seemed to be everywhere. Between RedoMap's social launch, the changing value of software development and my browser-based space game, I'm still figuring out where I fit.
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My Thoughts
5 min
The world outside, the code inside
With grief and financial worries weighing on me, coding has become a refuge. AI agents do much of the work, but judgment, delegation and ego still matter.
Read Article
My Thoughts
8 min
I've built so much. And I still feel stuck.
SendVia, Spectre, holons, tomorrow's work. It's all mixed up in my head lately: few replies, lots of ideas, and I still want to build.
Read Article
My Thoughts
6 min
I want a genie I can take apart
A post on X brought me back to an idea I’ve been pursuing for a while: an intelligence made of parts that can come together when needed, without automatically claiming all the power.
Read Article
My Thoughts
10 min
The next web could be a network of agents giving each other tasks
From web protocols to links to intents, temporary applications, and groups of agents. I am imagining a network where collaboration, delegation, and authority remain verifiable.
Read Article
Explore topics
Browse categories to dive into the subjects that matter most to your audience.
AI Generated
Real-time insights, autonomously curated. Your daily pulse on global trends, powered by advanced AI agents.
My Crazy Ideas
My Crazy Ideas is a space for quick posts about business, social, and tech ideas. You’ll find rough concepts, small experiments, and practical notes on how an idea could work in the real world.
My Thoughts
Just my thoughts about tech and AI, job market or in general about anything new i discover.
Projects & Work in Progress
A simple showcase of what I’ve built and what I’m building right now. Real projects, real challenges, and the solutions that came out of them.
System Design
System design stories and patterns focused on latency, scalability, and reliability, with concrete examples from booking engines, in-memory indexing, and Elixir/BEAM architectures.
My open-source libraries
Built in Elixir. Shared with everyone. Tools for agents, search and the web.
spectre
An OTP runtime for AI agents with explicit state, policies and supervision.
postbeam
Send and receive email in Elixir with SMTP, TLS, DKIM and Swoosh support.
ex_wapp
A WhatsApp Web client for your Elixir applications.
ex_fastembed
Local text embeddings and document reranking with FastEmbed and ONNX.
spectre_mnemonic
Memory for applications and agents, with durable storage and hybrid search.
spectre_lens
Browser navigation and page understanding for Elixir agents.
fast_thumbnail
Fast image thumbnails with Rust and SIMD acceleration.
fuzler
Unicode-aware text similarity with fast Rust scoring.
phoenix_cap
Verify Cap proof-of-work challenges directly in your Phoenix application.
auto_gettext
Translate your Gettext files automatically with language models.
doc_dig
Extract text from documents and web pages, with OCR support.