🔗 Asynchronous tasks and streaming UIs in Phoenix LiveView

The three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. I lean toward laziness more than the other two, often thinking, “There’s got to be an easier way.” A recent example of this was when I was experimenting with streaming LLM output in LiveView. While researching, I found that the most popular article on the topic, Streaming ChatGPT Responses With Phoenix LiveView by Sean Moriarity, to be quite complex. I knew there had to be a simpler solution; that’s when I stumbled across LiveView’s asynchronous functions: assign_async/4, stream_async/4, start_async/4, and handle_async/3.

These functions leverage Elixir’s lightweight processes to perform work off the main LiveView process. When the work is completed, your application can deal with the results without disrupting your user’s experience.