Bruce Tate is a kayaker, climber, programmer and father of two from Chattanooga, Tennessee. A serial entrepreneur, he has helped start three companies, and most recently served as CTO for icanmakeitbetter. The author of more than a dozen books is active in the Elixir community as a speaker, author, editor and conference organizer. His love for teaching and computer languages led him to found Groxio in 2018.
Elixir developers know metaprogramming: writing code that writes code. What if we applied the same thinking to AI prompts?
Metaprompting is creating prompts that write and persist other prompts. Just as Elixir’s metaprogramming generates context-appropriate code, metaprompts generate context-appropriate instructions for AI assistants. This talk draws high-level comparisons between programming in Elixir and programming with Claude.
Through examples like scout/plan/build/QA workflows, you’ll see how the same patterns that make Elixir code elegant—composition, clear responsibilities, reusable abstractions—also make AI-assisted development reliable. Learn to think about prompt engineering as a programming discipline by applying principles you already know: small focused pieces, context awareness, and generated artifacts that persist across sessions. developer joy.
OBJECTIVES To teach you:
AUDIENCE