Stateful agents, stateless infrastructure: the transport gap AI teams are patching by hand

Matthew O'Riordan discusses the challenges AI teams face due to the absence of a dedicated session layer between agent frameworks and user devices, which affects the stateful interaction necessary for agentic AI applications. Current solutions like HTTP streaming and SSE are insufficient for maintaining long-running, bidirectional sessions, leading to fragile connections that can't recover from network disruptions and lack mechanisms for user interaction or human handover. O'Riordan highlights how AI companies like Intercom and HubSpot have had to build custom workarounds, such as message buffers and state serialization, to address these issues, but these efforts often lead to complexity and inefficiencies. The emerging solution is a "durable session" layer, which provides persistent, addressable connections that support multi-device continuity, agent visibility, and seamless human-AI coordination. Companies like Ably are developing infrastructure to address these gaps, offering a more reliable foundation for AI applications that allows engineering teams to focus on higher-value tasks rather than maintaining session infrastructure.