If you are just “gluing together API calls” that’s exactly where Elixir state machines and supervisors make your agentic code so much easier to write. API calls are constantly failing, timing out, retrying, and being pre/post processed, and you need to keep track of the state of your agent across multiple failure modes, recover gracefully, and coordinate between processes. In most other languages like Python or TypeScript that’s a hell of a lot of process orchestration code (Bull/Celery), try/catches, health checks, retry logic, and global state management in a a database of some sort. Compare that to Elixir processes where you get most of that for free because the language was designed exactly for that. It’s just a state machine that can crash and recover gracefully in the right order with all related processes. The BEAM is not just about running millions of processes at scale. It’s also about simplifying how you reason about a single process lifecycle, and long running agent lifecycles can get really complex.

When you are just “gluing together API calls” surrounding tooling doesn’t matter as much. I don’t care that Elixir doesn’t have such a large community as Python, I’m just gluing together API calls, I don’t have dependencies.