Agents in Elixir are simple abstractions for managing state in concurrent applications, providing a way to encapsulate and manipulate state across multiple processes.

Agents in Elixir provide a straightforward way to manage state within applications, allowing developers to encapsulate and manipulate state in a concurrent and safe manner. An Agent is a special kind of process that holds state, enabling you to read from and write to that state using a set of functions. To create an Agent, you can use the Agent.start_link function, which initializes the Agent with an initial state. Once the Agent is running, you can interact with it using functions like Agent.get to retrieve its state and Agent.update or Agent.set to modify it. This encapsulation of state within an Agent promotes a clear separation of concerns, as the state is managed independently of the processes that use it. Agents are particularly useful when you need to maintain shared state across different parts of your application while still adhering to the principles of immutability and isolation. By using Agents, Elixir developers can build robust applications that require state management without introducing the complexities of shared mutable state.