You can certainly do hot code reloads. I use this constantly when developing new projects. I even wrote a tutorial for it [here](https://embedded-elixir.com/post/2018-12-10-using-distributi...)

Your homemade solution to do hot code reload have nothing to do with Nerves though, it's just plain Erling/Elixir. So again, what do I gain from using Nerves?

That's the beauty of Nerves in my opinion. We aren't trying to be a web framework. If that's what you want, bring it yourself. Nerves is here as a tooling for deploying your application to hardware platforms. It takes care of all the stuff that most people don't want to deal with. This means that aside from learning some basic mix tasks (`mix firmware` to assemble your firmware and `mix burn` to write it to an SD Card), you don't need to "learn Nerves" only "learn Elixir".

As a casual user of Nerves, it's the easiest way of getting Elixir code running on a clean RPi system. I don't want to install a stripped down Linux myself, then install Erlang and Elixir, then transfer the built code every time and restart the board, or write scripts to do that. That would be a waste of my time when I just want to develop my app.

With Nerves I could just write code and run `mix firmware && ./upload.sh` (the upload script was generated by Nerves).