🔗 Your agent framework is just a bad clone of Elixir: concurrency lessons from telecom to AI

Recently, José Valim published "Why Elixir is the Best Language for AI", citing a Tencent study showing Elixir achieved the highest LLM code completion rate across 20 languages. Claude Opus 4 scored 80.3% on Elixir problems versus 74.9% for C#, the next-best performer.

But there's a deeper argument than "LLMs write good Elixir." It's this: the actor model that Erlang introduced in 1986 is the agent model that AI is rediscovering in 2026. Every pattern the Python AI ecosystem is building (isolated state, message passing, supervision hierarchies, fault recovery) already exists in the BEAM virtual machine. And it's been running telecom switches, WhatsApp, and Discord at scale for decades.

I've been building agentic commerce infrastructure at New Generation. Before that, I shipped a full AI stack serving more than 3 million merchants at a unicorn Brazilian fintech. Both systems run on Elixir. Here's why that's not a hipster language choice. It's an architectural inevitability.

A note on terminology: Throughout this post I refer to "the BEAM." BEAM is the virtual machine that runs both Erlang and Elixir code, similar to how the JVM runs both Java and Kotlin. Erlang (1986) created the VM and the concurrency model. Elixir (2012) is a modern language built on top of it with better ergonomics. When I say "BEAM," I mean the runtime and its properties. When I say "Elixir," I mean the language we write.