The state machine your agent runtime is missing: session state as first-class infrastructure

The state machine your agent runtime is missing: session state as first-class infrastructure

Your agent's chat interface is a lie. It looks like a conversation, but every turn resets the state machine. The model doesn't remember what it was doing — it reconstructs it from context. And when reconstruction fails, you become the retry protocol.

This isn't a UI problem. It's a protocol problem.

The TCP analogy

A TCP connection has a state machine: SYN → SYN-ACK → ACK → ESTABLISHED. Every packet knows where it is in the lifecycle. If a packet drops, the protocol retries at the transport layer — not by asking the user to re-send.