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Topic guide

Elixir and the BEAM for AI systems

Every AI agent framework ships in Go or Python, and almost nobody asks why — or what it costs. The posts below make the unfashionable argument: the runtime agents actually want has existed since 1986, the language AI writes best is the one with the fewest ways to go wrong, and boring stacks ship faster than exciting ones.

Start with the concurrency-model post if you're evaluating stacks — it's the foundation the rest build on. The BEAM-for-agents post applies it to agent architectures, the Go post is the steelman for the mainstream choice, and the Ruby post is for when the right answer is the stack you already have.

The reading order

  1. 1.

    Elixir's Concurrency Model Is the One You Actually Want

    The foundation: processes, supervision, and why the concurrency model other stacks fake with queues and retries is the default here.

    May 16, 2026 14 min read

  2. 2.

    Elixir's BEAM Is the Runtime AI Agents Want

    Agents are long-running, stateful, failure-prone processes — exactly the workload the BEAM was designed for four decades ago.

    May 31, 2026 12 min read

  3. 3.

    Why Every AI Agent Framework Is Written in Go (And What That Costs You)

    The steelman: why every agent framework picked Go, and the supervision, hot-code, and state-recovery costs hiding in that choice.

    May 16, 2026 12 min read

  4. 4.

    Elixir Is the Language AI Codes Best

    Pattern matching, immutability, and a small surface area — why LLMs generate better Elixir than Python or TypeScript.

    May 27, 2026 8 min read

  5. 5.

    Ruby Isn't Dead, It Got Boring — And Boring Is Why It Ships

    The counterweight: boring is a feature. If the team knows Rails, the right AI stack might be the one that ships this quarter.

    May 16, 2026 12 min read

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