Core Team Panel - Gleam Gathering 2026

### TL;DR Gleam core team members shared their stories of discovering and staying with Gleam, their personal plans for 2026, how they maintain a friendly community atmosphere, and their thoughts on AI coding tools at the 2026 gathering. --- ## Introductions: Where They Came From and Why They Stayed ### Louis (Creator) “Why did I create Gleam? Because it’s a language I wanted to use for myself—a tool I wished existed to handle the boring, routine tasks of daily work. At work, if I was using Go, I’d miss Erlang; if I was using Erlang, I’d miss some features of TypeScript. I wanted to be using a different language. So I thought, why not take the best parts of all these languages and combine them into something that doesn’t suck? Turns out the answer was yes.” ### Hayley (Author of *Luster*) “I met Louis at a house party, and we talked about programming languages all night. They mentioned Gleam. I had some Elm background, and Gleam sounded like a similar, friendly, functional, not-too-complicated thing. Then I ignored it for six months, until Louis created the Gleam Discord server, which was enough to get me involved.” ### Jake (Compiler Contributor) “After university, I was looking for new languages to learn and really wanted to learn a functional one. At the time I was studying a lot of very esoteric stuff, and then Gleam felt like a breath of fresh air. But the thing is, when I joined the community, what impressed me most was Louis and Hayley complimenting my avatar. I thought: ‘Oh, these people… these people are really nice.’ And that’s how they tricked me into still working on Gleam.” ### Celia (Username Gears) “I was already interested in compilers at the time, writing my own toy language, learning by doing and then getting stuck. I thought I should look at a real compiler and get some inspiration for my project. I started contributing to the Rust compiler, but that codebase was too huge for me. When Gleam 1.0 was released, I saw it mentioned in many places, then checked the GitHub repo, saw it was written in Rust—a language I knew—so I started contributing. I contributed more and more, and then Louis said: ‘Oh yeah, you’ve contributed a lot. Want to join the team?’ So here I am.” --- ## Plans for 2026: What Everyone Is Busy With ### Celia (Compiler Direction) “There’s one thing I’ve been wanting to finish: function inlining—replacing calls to simple functions with the function body itself. I wrote the code a few months ago, everything seemed fine at first, the PR got merged, and then a bunch of bugs appeared. I fixed the bugs, more bugs appeared. A release was coming and there were still bugs, so we just disabled the feature. It’s been nagging at me. Also, I have a code generation library built on top of an Elm-based code generation library—once it’s done it’ll be cool, but there are some weird API issues I need to sit down and solve.” ### Hayley (Community & Speaking) “My plans might be a bit boring, but the V game taught us that boring is sometimes good. I just want to keep contributing to the compiler and improving developer experience—making code actions better, fixing bugs, smoothing out rough spots. Also, I want to speak at more conferences. If you have a say in who speaks at your conference, feel free to reach out.” ### Jake (Related to *Luster*) “My huge pile of todos is all *Luster*-related. The thing I most want to ship this year—urgently—is Lusty UI: a set of high-quality, unstyled, accessible components. Considering it’s only February, I think I’m making good progress, but if you remember I’ve been saying this for three years, maybe not that great. Besides that, I want to rewrite the guide, ship Fable (storybook version), get a proper website for *Luster*. Honestly, the list is a bit long and not very inspiring.” ### Louis (Whisp & Book) “I’ll talk more about this later—don’t want to spoil too much. But stepping a little outside Gleam Core, it would be great if Whisp could support WebSockets. That would be cool.” (When asked about the book, Louis replied “That question doesn’t need an answer.”) --- ## How to Maintain a Friendly Community Culture ### Louis’s View “We’ve been lucky—Gleam’s growth has been in a pretty good way, not the explosive exponential kind you see with some dubious crypto projects. So the size we’re dealing with means we haven’t needed to think of special new methods to indoctrinate newcomers with our expectations. We just keep leading by example, showing how we behave and interact, and then others do the same. People think: ‘Oh, look, this is how it’s done here.’ It works. As long as we maintain this very nice linear growth, we can do it this normal, cultural, organic way. If we suddenly became hugely popular, we’d probably have to rethink and figure out how to do it more efficiently.” ### Celia’s Addition “Since the 1.0 release, the Discord server has roughly quadrupled in size, but I don’t think you can feel the change. We’ve done a good job preserving that very close, friendly vibe. If we suddenly explode and get 100,000 people in the server, that might change. But so far, I think we’ve just passed along these cultural values through osmosis.” ### Hayley’s Mention of Safeguards “We have moderators like Isaac (the Australian one) who manages Minecraft-related communities much larger than ours. In our private mod chat where we go to be anxious, he often shares experience from running big communities. So if we suddenly hit that situation, we wouldn’t be entirely in unknown territory.” ### Jake Points Out a Simple Tactic “The banner on the website that says ‘No Nazis’ seems to filter out a certain type of person. That definitely changes the community atmosphere.” --- ## AI Tools’ Impact on Gleam ### Louis (Cultural Aspect) “AI is the biggest shift I’ve seen in my career in terms of how many people change how they write code. I’m not particularly on board with the idea that we’ll soon have general AI and everything will be solved. For a long time, we’ll still rely mainly on programming to get things done. But it’s really important to try to understand what’s actually happening. I do experiment, use it, understand it, so I can grasp what effect it might have on people in the Gleam community. So far, nothing has made me think we need to change our strategy of developing Gleam, designing APIs, and prioritizing human learning. It seems that even if the goal isn’t to make AI work well, making things easy for humans to learn works equally well for these models.” ### Louis (Concern for Project Maintenance) “One thing I’m a bit worried about—its impact on open source project maintenance. In the past, if someone proposed a change to an open source project, they had already invested some time, and the maintainer also needed to invest time to evaluate and resolve it. Now, you can generate code for a few cents and throw it at a project, but the project still has to put in the effort to verify whether it’s acceptable. We haven’t run into this problem yet, but it could become one. So we need to be very careful about that.” ### Jake (Cultural Separation) “This technology itself encourages people to detach from the community. People now ask LLMs technical questions instead of asking the community. When you’re writing a library or application, you might also engage less with the language itself. I think this might… it’s not a threat to Gleam, but I think it’s a direction AI is really pushing, and we’re working in the opposite direction—prioritizing community and interaction.” ### Hayley (Importance of Documentation) “Good documentation and learning resources are important. Just yesterday someone asked: ‘How can I learn Gleam with another tool?’ because they didn’t know about Gleam’s own built-in tools. Then we gave them the links and they loved it. So it’s about making these resources findable, so people don’t feel they need to turn to some LLM to learn. I think we’re doing pretty well there, but if it becomes common that people can’t find what they need and turn to AI-generated stuff, we’ll need to pay attention.” ### Celia (Community Accessibility) “I basically agree with what’s been said. Having good docs and also having the community—very friendly, very willing to answer people’s questions about the language—be accessible is helpful too. Especially because Gleam is relatively new, there’s less information out there, so some AIs don’t perform that well. But the community is willing to help those who need it, and I think that’s great.” --- Source: Core Team Panel - Gleam Gathering 2026 (https://youtu.be/LgfzH_WBlr4)