Elm ”best practices” in 2026

Hi!

LLM / agent era brought myself back to Elm, finally (no runtime errors, beautiful readable code, awesome compiler errors, stable language…). I love to see that Elm is still there and I see enough activity on important community packages.

What resources would you suggest to follow for elm-related work in 2026? Or recent examples to follow?

For example, I have been playing with elm-pages, and just noticed that I missed GitHub - dillonkearns/elm-tailwind-classes · GitHub when using tailwindcss. I keep wondering, what else I am missing…

I don’t think this is some kind of “best practice” but since you mentioned LLM and elm-pages in the same post…

I have found that making a site with elm-pages and AI coding agents works very well. If you have an existing site or elm-pages starter project, they can quite easily figure out how to do things.

I like elm-css, and tend to use Css.Global for most of my CSS, for example. I use it like we used to use compass in the old days, as a sort of better compass that is a functional language instead of whatever hacky internal language compass built in.

I took an elm-pages starter project (GitHub - kraklin/elm-pages-blog-starter: Starter template for blog with elm-pages · GitHub), and also another project I have where the CSS was done the way I like it, and told the coding agent to refactor the code to match the style I wanted.

elm-tailwind-classes will probably work very well too.

I used pencil.dev to develop some screenshots - it comes with and MCP server. But also, I think Google Sketch might be a better supported tool to use for this and also has MCP server. I was able to make requests like “add the whatever page from pencil to the project”, and it did all the work to add the new page to the elm-pages project using exactly the right coding patterns and so on.

The Elm Weekly newsletter!

@lydell Thanks for confirming that the newsletter is the thing to follow right now!

Thanks. Now I know to check my setup against GitHub - kraklin/elm-pages-blog-starter: Starter template for blog with elm-pages · GitHub

I am also using Nix, which adds some twist for the setup, but that’s my problem and something I am used to.

I have had great experience with Elm and agents for so far. I’ll see how it manages, when the code gets more complex and I need more ports etc…

Since you mentioned you’re using Nix you might also be interested in the following:

Thanks! I’ll definitely also look into your dev environments…

Have you done projects with elm-pages with nix already?

Unfortunately, no. I use Astro for static websites. This project uses Astro in the app and workshop folders.