90% AI, 100% BEAM: Building an Erlang VM in Zig with Claude

What happens when you combine 8 years of Elixir experience with AI-powered development tools? You get Typhon—an experimental Erlang BEAM virtual machine written in Zig, with 90% of the code generated by AI under human guidance.

In this deep-dive session, Chase McCarthy will take you inside the BEAM—the virtual machine that makes Erlang and Elixir tick—and show how he's rebuilding it from scratch with a focus on WebAssembly and embedded devices.

What you'll learn:
- How the BEAM actually works under the hood (processes, schedulers, message passing)
- Why Zig is an ideal language for VM development and WASM targets
- The task-based workflow that makes AI coding assistants actually productive
- Live demos: Erlang GenServers running in your browser, and an autonomous agent simulation powered by OTP

The numbers so far:
- 100x smaller memory footprint than OTP's BEAM
- ~700KB WASM binary for the VM itself
- 10x performance penalty (still experimental!)
- Targeting ESP32 and STM32 embedded platforms

Whether you're curious about VM internals, interested in AI-assisted development workflows, or excited about running Elixir in places it's never run before, this talk has something for you.