If you think about it, OTP makes a lot of sense for always-on, reachable agents. Agents need to talk to external systems all the time: web services, databases, message queues, local tools.
More than a year ago, I had the idea of building a personal AI assistant connected to multiple services (https://github.com/konovalov-nk/synaptra/blob/main/docs/arch...). But I didn't want to build yet another over-engineered k8s setup just to get isolation and separation of concerns.
Over time, I realized OTP was much closer to the model I actually wanted.
Why?
Some services want to run locally: memory, low-latency text-to-speech, private data access. The agent can also run locally while delegating work across supervised processes. Things will fail, and that's fine — Erlang was built around exactly that assumption.
Once you look at agents this way, they indeed look less like chat sessions and more like long-lived, supervised, stateful processes.
In that sense, Erlang really was ahead of its time.
Comments
Pivot to Erlang is real!
I'm kidding of course but feels like the time has come to look closely into Erlang ecosystem and OTP.
There's even agentic framework for this: https://jido.run/blog/jido-2-0-is-here
If you think about it, OTP makes a lot of sense for always-on, reachable agents. Agents need to talk to external systems all the time: web services, databases, message queues, local tools.
More than a year ago, I had the idea of building a personal AI assistant connected to multiple services (https://github.com/konovalov-nk/synaptra/blob/main/docs/arch...). But I didn't want to build yet another over-engineered k8s setup just to get isolation and separation of concerns.
Over time, I realized OTP was much closer to the model I actually wanted.
Why?
Some services want to run locally: memory, low-latency text-to-speech, private data access. The agent can also run locally while delegating work across supervised processes. Things will fail, and that's fine — Erlang was built around exactly that assumption.
Once you look at agents this way, they indeed look less like chat sessions and more like long-lived, supervised, stateful processes.
In that sense, Erlang really was ahead of its time.