Show HN: Jido 2.0, Elixir Agent Framework
224 points - today at 3:48 PM
Hi HN!
I'm the author of an Elixir Agent Framework called Jido. We reached our 2.0 release this week, shipping a production-hardened framework to build, manage and run Agents on the BEAM.
Jido now supports a host of Agentic features, including:
- Tool Calling and Agent Skills - Comprehensive multi-agent support across distributed BEAM processes with Supervision - Multiple reasoning strategies including ReAct, Chain of Thought, Tree of Thought, and more - Advanced workflow capabilities - Durability through a robust Storage and Persistence layer - Agentic Memory - MCP and Sensors to interface with external services - Deep observability and debugging capabilities, including full stack OTel
I know Agent Frameworks can be considered a bit stale, but there hasn't been a major release of a framework on the BEAM. With a growing realization that the architecture of the BEAM is a good match for Agentic workloads, the time was right to make the announcement.
My background is enterprise engineering, distributed systems and Open Source. We've got a strong and growing community of builders committed to the Jido ecosystem. We're looking forward to what gets built on top of Jido!
Come build agents with us!
Comments
One gap I keep noticing with agent frameworks across all languages: they can read code, docs, browse the web, query databases, but none of them can access what was discussed in meetings. That's where half the context lives for most teams.
We built an MCP server for exactly this (Vexa, open-source). Bots join Meet/Teams/Zoom calls, transcribe in real-time, and serve it all via MCP so any agent can query "what did the team decide about X." Would be interesting to see a Jido skill for meeting transcript access — especially with the real-time streaming you have.
I’ve read a lot on HN about how BEAM execution model is perfect for AI. I think a crucial part that’s usually missing in LLM-focused libraries is the robustness story in the face of node failures, rolling deployments, etc. There’s a misconception about Elixir (demonstrated in one of the claw comments below) that it provides location transparency - it ain’t so. You can have the most robust OTP node, but if you commit to an agent inside a long running process, it will go down when the node does.
Having clear, pure agent state between every API call step goes a long way towards solving that - put it in Mnesia or Redis, pick up on another node when the original is decommissioned. Checkpointing is the solution
Just a heads up, some of your code samples seem to be having an issue with entity escaping.
name: "my_agent",
description: "A simple agent",https://web.archive.org/web/20260305161030/https://jido.run/
https://github.com/openai/symphony
I'm not very familiar with the space, I follow Elixir goings on more than some of the AI stuff.
It is curious... and refreshing... to see Elixir & the BEAM popping up for these sorts of orchestration type workloads.
I’ve found the hardest part with agent frameworks isn’t model plumbing, it’s operational boundaries: how you isolate tools, enforce time/budget limits, and recover from partial failures when an agent call chain fans out.
BEAM’s supervision model feels like a genuinely strong fit for that, especially if each tool execution can be treated as a supervised unit with clear restart/escalation semantics. Curious whether you’ve seen teams default to many small specialized agents vs fewer general agents with stricter policies.
I just LLM-built an A2A package which is a GenServer-like abstraction. I however missed that there already was another A2A implementation for Elixir. Anyway, I decided to leave it up because the package semantics were different enough. Here it is if anyone is interested: https://github.com/actioncard/a2a-elixir
Congrats on the release!
Edit: for those not familiar with the BEAM ecosystem, observer shows all the running Erlang 'processes' (internal to the VM). Here are some examples screenshots on one of the first Google hits I found:
https://fly.io/docs/elixir/advanced-guides/connect-observer-...
(Probably complimentary but wanted to check)
Sidian Sidekicks, Obsidian vault reviewer agents.
I think Jido will be prefect for us and will help us organize and streamline not just our agent interactions but make them more clear, what is happening and which agent is doing what.
And on top of that, I get excuse to include Elixir in this project.
Thanks for shipping.
What's old is now rebranded, reheated and new again.