Show HN: Jido – Run 10k agents at 25KB each (Elixir)

[mikehostetler]

Hi HN!

I'm Mike Hostetler and I built Jido, an Agent SDK in Elixir that lets you run thousands of agents without heavy infrastructure.

Repo: https://github.com/agentjido/jido Getting Started: https://hexdocs.pm/jido/getting-started.html

Why another framework?

After using several popular Agent frameworks and platforms, I had two key challenges:

- Running multiple agents required process-heavy infrastructure like Docker or K8s. Running 50,000 agents in parallel was costly and diminished the benefits of agentic programming.

- Today's agents require too much human intervention when building workflows. Why couldn't agents manage their own WDLC (Workflow Design Life Cycle)? This felt like a major missing piece.

Agentic frameworks were written for humans. LLMs working with this code were constantly working around human work-style assumptions. So, I wrote a framework specifically for LLMs to code and operate their own agentic flows.

Elixir was a natural choice because of it's functional nature, rock-solid concurrency primitives and "let-it-crash" philosophy with dynamic error compensation. Hot code reloading was a bonus.

Agents in Jido use 25Kb of memory at rest and can easily serialize then hibernate for long-lived access. Agents possess the APIs to dynamically start and manage their own sub-agents or any other Elixir process utilizing Elixir's OTP architecture.

Jido Actions are functional primitives that Agents can dynamically orchestrate into workflows. Generated code can either run in a separate process in the current VM or in another BEAM VM that's linked and hardened before introduction into the Agent VM.

I'm excited to help enable a world where thousands of agents work seamlessly on behalf of their human operators.

Thanks!

[travisgriggs]

I used GPT (irony) to (possibly) get to the point of the name:

“… • In Japanese, 自動 (Jidō) means “automatic” or “self-moving,” often seen in terms like “jidōsha” (automobile). …”

[innocentoldguy]

Yes, 自動 is a common prefix in Japanese that means automatic. So, in your example, the first two kanji mean automatic and the last kanji means car.

自動車 (jidousha): Automobile

Other examples include:

自動販売機 (jidouhanbaiki): Vending machine

自動ドア (jidoudoa): Automatic door

自動エリクサー (jidouerikusa-): Automatic Elixir (joking)

[mikehostetler]

You got it ;-)

[sbrother]

This looks great; I've been working on something similar but I'll drop it since this is much further along. Do you have a list of issues/feature requests you'd like contributions on?

[mikehostetler]

I'm pushing on two efforts:

- How "robust" do I build the Agent GenServer? There is a working implementation in the repo, but it's simplistic. How robust should the event implementation of Signals be? I'd love feedback on that - Examples of Agents and Actions - the other repo's in the org have some basic examples, and I'm building out chat first as that is the most requested - but expansion there would be fantastic

Thanks!

[jittoshi]

Can you elaborate on the scaling potential here, given your choice of stack?

[mikehostetler]

To run multiple agents in TypeScript, you're typically reaching for a package like 'pm2'. This starts a Node.js process for each Agent, then you need another tool like Redis for them to communicate.

Adding Docker adds even more weight.

You could run multiple agents in a single Node.js process, but you'll eventually face event-loop conflicts.

With Elixir and BEAM, you already have the tools to run agents as a lightweight Erlang process. You also have built-in PubSub for inter-agent communication (via a package).

This provides the ability for safely running 1000's of agents in a single BEAM Node. This is much more robust and efficient then Node.js and TypeScript.

[lizzas]

Agent as in AI or agent as in actor framework? Or both?

[mikehostetler]

This SDK is the actor framework with the primitives.

There will be additional packages to facilitate chat (https://github.com/agentjido/jido_chat) and AI (https://github.com/agentjido/jido_ai)

There's a WIP workbench app that will be 1-click deployable to set up and chat with a Jido AI agent soon: https://github.com/agentjido/jido_workbench