After trying out Phoenix.new to build an application, I hit the credit limit for the current pay period.
I tried to export the latest progress by using the Clone 'app' to your local computer option. But the git repository is 22 hours behind and missing most of the changes to the application that were made.
I don’t see any other way to export current progress. Does anyone know if the data will eventually be available in git? Is my only option to manually create files locally and copy the contents over one-by-one? Do I have a limited time to do that before the Preview environment and changes are lost?
World, meet Phoenix.new, a batteries-included fully-online coding agent tailored to Elixir and Phoenix.
And the official website:
The Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
Describe your app, and watch it take shape. Prototype quickly, experiment freely, and share instantly.
Pragmatic summary
When you log into your fly.io dashboard, you should see a new section between Managed PostgreSQL and Upstash Redis in the sidebar. It’s a subscription service, starting at $20 a month. Since the product is so new, there’s still little documentation out there. Which is part of the reason why I’m posting on the forum, in hopes of learning from others while there’s still time to save the progress I’ve made on this app
All good! Thanks for asking for more context. In hindsight, I should have thought to provide it given how new the service is.
It was a good experience overall, though it was difficult to gauge how much credit remained since the real-time usage stats aren’t live yet I was being thoughtful about usage, but couldn’t gauge how close I actually was. Watching the agent get stuck in a debug loop a few times and burning resources wasn’t the funnest. Even so, hitting the end was a surprise!
At this point I’m just hoping there’s a way to get a reliable export soon, so I can keep developing this app locally and manually deploy it. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!
Update: the project was marked as public and previously available at the URL https://73l59v-4000.phx.run/. But that site is no longer resolving. I noticed the preview tab inside Phoenix.new IDE is no longer working either. Feels like a matter of time before the IDE is recycled as well
Looks like it’s time to bite-the-bullet and manually copy files one-by-one out of the VScode web editor into local files.
Can you walk me through exactly what happens when you copy the git clone url from the hamburger menu. It clones a fresh project, but it doesn’t contain the up to date files? Are you trying to pull changes locally into an already cloned repo, or doing fresh? There’s a bug in our instructions for replacing your remote, but please try cloning into a fresh local dir to verify state. On the IDE machine there is a bare git repo that the agent’s git pushes to, and that’s what we’re cloning. It uses a post-commit hook, but something that may have gotten wedged. You can verify that from the agent terminate by running git push fly which will push to the local git repo, to see if things are up to date or bugged.
If you’re not able to hit your phx.run, then the webserver stopped running. You can ask the agent to start it again, but we’re going to add UI around this to give you a click to relaunch once your server has launched before. Let me know and we’ll help you get things sorted out. Your IDE /files won’t be recycled
Looking it over again, I think I know what happened. It was caused by me asking Phoenix.new to start over. The first time I used it, it did a great job generating an app without much intervention. After looking over the app, I decided to take it in a different direction. So I put into the chat:
Thanks for the help so far. I’d like to delete this app and start over. Is that possible?
Looking back over the git history that is included in the git clone, it matches that original application build. Not the app I generated after it
Not sure how much visibility you have into the Phoenix.new logs, but I give you (or anyone else at fly.io) full permission to look into any of the ones on my account if it could help. If you don’t, let me know and I’m happy to provide any additional information that’s visible only from my side!
Note for future reference you can start a new chat. You can generate any number of projects within your IDE. They all live in /workspace. You can have multiple chats around the same codebase, ie dedicated to testing, refactors, etc, or multiple chats around different codebases, so in the future start a new chat and have it go to town. The phx.run urls are port forwarded, so you can even ask the agent to start other projects at different ports and have [slug]-4000.phx.run and [slug]-4001.phx.run etc running at the same time. The only limitation currently is we don’t allow concurrent LLM requests, so you can have agents actively working on files within multiple chats at the same time (it will cancel the inflight one), but you can absolutely hop back and forth b/w chats.
I was being thoughtful about usage, but couldn’t gauge how close I actually was. Watching the agent get stuck in a debug loop a few times and burning resources wasn’t the funnest. Even so, hitting the end was a surprise!
