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What is building-blocks?

elixir-vibe/building-blocks — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

13Audience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · easy

In one sentence

A living document that lays out a set of open-source Elixir tools designed to let AI-written code across design, frontend, and backend be checked for consistency.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((building-blocks))
    What it does
      Explains a stack of verification tools
      Names the verification gap problem
      Links to eleven separate boundary tools
    Tech stack
      Elixir
      Erlang VM
      Mermaid diagrams
    Use cases
      Understand why AI code disagrees with itself
      Explore linked design and session tools
      Read the roadmap before adopting a tool
    Audience
      Elixir developers
      AI tooling researchers

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Read the manifesto and layer pages to understand why AI-generated code across a stack can silently disagree.

USE CASE 2

Browse the eleven linked tools to find one that solves a specific verification problem, like session replay or dependency tracing.

USE CASE 3

Use the roadmap and uncertainties sections to judge whether to bet on this ecosystem for a project.

What is it built with?

ElixirErlangMermaid

How does it compare?

elixir-vibe/building-blocks09catho/axon0x1-1/revival
Stars131313
LanguageJavaScriptC++
Setup difficultyeasymoderatehard
Complexity2/54/55/5
Audiencedeveloperresearcherdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

This is a document, not installable software, the individual tools it links to each have their own setup.

The prose is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and the code samples are MIT, both allowing free use with attribution.

So what is it?

This repository is a document, not a piece of software. It describes a collection of open-source tools built around the Elixir and Erlang ecosystem, all aimed at solving a specific problem with AI-generated code: AI can write a frontend, a backend, a database schema, and a design, but nothing checks whether all those pieces agree with each other. The core argument is that modern software is split by invisible boundaries: design lives in one tool, code in another, the browser runtime in a third, the server somewhere else. When any piece breaks, the error message has no way to point back to its actual cause because the tools cannot see across those walls. The project calls this the verification gap, and its thesis is that the answer is not smarter AI models but a better environment that pushes back when something is wrong. To close that gap, the project ships or links to a set of tools, each addressing one boundary. There is a design editor that stores designs as structured data so they can be compared to code, a session recorder that replays what a user actually did, a dependency analyzer that traces why a piece of code runs, a toolchain that runs inside the application itself rather than as a separate build step, a JavaScript runtime inside the Erlang virtual machine, and linters that specifically flag patterns common in AI-generated code. All of these are already released as open-source packages under the Elixir Vibe and Elixir Volt organizations on GitHub. The repository itself is a living standard in the style of web specifications: no version numbers, no release dates, continuously corrected, with the commit history as the changelog. Each layer gets its own page explaining what problem it addresses and what its limits are. There is also a manifesto explaining the philosophy, an architecture section with diagrams, a phased roadmap, and an uncertainties section that explicitly names what is unproven. Sections are marked draft or settled depending on their stability. It is written by one person using some of the tools on themselves. The code for each tool lives in separate GitHub organizations, this document explains how they compose.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Summarize the verification gap problem described in the building-blocks manifesto.
Prompt 2
Which of the building-blocks tools would help me trace why a piece of Elixir code runs?
Prompt 3
Explain how phoenix_replay and Reach fit into the building-blocks architecture.
Prompt 4
Help me decide if the building-blocks ecosystem is mature enough to adopt for my Elixir project.

Frequently asked questions

What is building-blocks?

A living document that lays out a set of open-source Elixir tools designed to let AI-written code across design, frontend, and backend be checked for consistency.

What license does building-blocks use?

The prose is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and the code samples are MIT, both allowing free use with attribution.

How hard is building-blocks to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is building-blocks for?

Mainly developer.

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