It will try to start distribution before modules are loaded, so it will give you an error about the epmd module not existing because modules haven't been loaded yet at that stage.
If you skip the --name or --sname flags and manually start distribution with Node.start everything works

It's an alpha for early testers, please open an issue with any bug you found!

It's not that it's hard in neovim, it's that in helix it's really trivial, it's just 2 lines vs the 10 or so lines you need in neovim

Pleasant surprise I hope hahaha

Expert like Lexical spawns a separate vm to compile and analyze your code. It is possible that vm is taking some time to start and your editor is sending messages before it's up(thus the connection error)
Can you share more of the logs and open an issue in the expert repo?

It does! It’s the main reason I wanted it