Author of Jido here
I’m actively wrestling with these ideas. I’ve implemented several “Applications” with Jido now that … after finishing them … I really struggle to answer whether they are better with Jido or not. Long term - a few GenServers that wrap req calls to LLM API’s are better.
I have this overwhelming feeling that Jido is the right direction - but has not arrived at a sensible destination.
A few other thoughts to share:
- There’s a complexity vector here - a simple LLM wrapper doesn’t need a sophisticated agent framework - Oban works great.
- Most agent implementations are really really simplistic - any dreams of massive swarms of agents demonstrating collective intelligence are still dreams - Elixir is more suited to larger swarms of agents due to OTP
- While implementing Jido, I learned a lot about OTP - the educational journey was amazing. I found Joe Armstrong’s blog while on this journey - and realized that some of the features of Jido are simply constrained implementations of OTP - I don’t think that’s bad necessarily - but probably not the best implementation
- While it’s easy to write an run 10,000 agents with Jido - it’s not that useful - for all of the normal distributed systems problems that come from running and coordinating 10,000 GenServers
There’s more questions then answers right now - but I do think LLM’s are here to stay so it’s better to wrestle with them
This particular space in our industry is evolving a lot right now - so I’m content to just continue wrestling and playing with the ideas. A few “first principles” I’ve collected so far:
- Agents will be a new buzzword for “LLM Applications”
- Agentic workflows are just workflows - low volume ETL pipelines with more variety
- Multi-agent is simply a new variant on distributed systems problems
- Elixir is well-suited for this - but suffers from a slower iteration cycle - so I’ve been following Python and TS “agent” frameworks closely and pulling in patterns to Jido that I feel will be durable over time
