[toast0]

Ok, I kind of see what you're saying, but IMHO, you're trying to hide the central, enabling abstraction of BEAM environments, which is sending messages to other processes.

If you really don't like the get_state above, I think it'd make more sense to just ditch it, and use GenServer.call(robot, :get_state) in places where you'd call robot.get_state(). Those three lines of definition don't seem to be doing you much good, and calling GenServer directly isn't too hard; I probably wouldn't write the underlying make_ref / monitor / send / receive / demonitor myself in the general case, but it can be useful sometimes.

In my experience with distributed Erlang, we'd have the server in one file, and the client in another; the exports for the client were the public api, and the handle_calls where the implementation. We'd often have a smidge of logic in the client, to pick the right pg to send messages to or whatever, so it useful to have that instead of just a gen_server:call in the calling code.