Soma is an Erlang/OTP-native agent runtime. Every session, run, and tool call is a supervised OTP process — not a function calling tools in a loop.
The thesis is simple: agents fail in operational ways — they time out, they hang, they crash, they get cancelled. OTP already has the supervision, monitoring, and crash-isolation semantics for exactly that, so Soma models a run as a process tree instead of an in-process loop.
A constrained Lisp-flavored grammar compiles to the exact step-list the runtime executes — compile-only, no processes, one-way dependency.
A pure proposal / policy boundary turns an LLM call into typed, allowlist-checked data before any tool ever runs.
A durable event log is the source of truth; the in-memory index is a rebuildable cache that reconstructs run progress after a restart.
Every tool invocation crosses a process boundary. A tool crash is data for the run, not a crash of the session.
# start the daemon, then run a step list
soma daemon
soma run ./pipeline.lfe
soma statusA cancel is a message that stops the active tool process, not a flag checked at the end.
Links, monitors, and supervision do the fault-tolerance work — not a pile of defensive try/catch.
Every session, run, and tool call emits a durable, queryable event from day one.