--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- Why Your AI UX Is Broken (and It's Not the Model's Fault) — Mike Christensen, Ably description: >- SSE ties a response stream to a single connection. The user refreshes the page, walks out of WiFi range, or opens a second tab and the in-progress response is gone. Abort and resume are mutually exclusive for the same reason: the only signal a client can send over a one-way pipe is closing it, so the agent cannot tell the difference between a cancel and a disconnect. Vercel's AI SDK documents this explicitly. Mike Christensen from Ably makes the case for treating the session itself as a durable shared resource, decoupled from any individual connection, device, or agent instance. Clients subscribe to the session rather than to a request, so reconnects resume automatically, any tab or device has full visibility of live activity, and concurrent agents write independently without routing everything through an orchestrator. The demo shows all of this: multi-tab sync, a forced network disconnect that self-recovers, two agents running in parallel, and a handoff to a human support agent who joins the session mid-conversation with the full interaction history already visible. Speaker info: - https://x.com/christensencode - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikescottchristensen/ Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction to AI chat applications 0:51 Current implementation: Direct HTTP streaming and SSE 3:03 Three foundational capabilities for great AI products 4:34 Limitations of direct HTTP streaming 5:21 Introducing durable sessions 6:06 Resumability in streams 7:43 The conflict between SSE, resumability, and live control 9:13 Multi-device and multi-tab synchronization issues 11:12 Handling concurrent multi-agent architectures 12:54 Using Pub/Sub and Ably channels for durable sessions 14:12 Introducing Ably AI Transport SDK 15:34 Live demo of durable session capabilities 17:38 Handoff to human support agent --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/YNJvm7t3yq8-why-your-ai-ux-is-broken-and-it-s-not-the-model-s-fault Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/why-your-ai-ux-is-broken-and-it-s-not-the-model-s-f-04307218f0ee markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/why-your-ai-ux-is-broken-and-it-s-not-the-model-s-f-04307218f0ee.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T14:11:03.875Z' language: null children: [] videoId: YNJvm7t3yq8 durationSeconds: 1118 publishedAt: '2026-05-17T15:30:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 26 endSeconds: 60 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=26' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 60 endSeconds: 71 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=60' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 71 endSeconds: 191 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=71' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 191 endSeconds: 201 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=191' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 201 endSeconds: 277 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=201' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 201 endSeconds: 277 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=201' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 288 endSeconds: 322 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=288' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 322 endSeconds: 333 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=322' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 376 endSeconds: 463 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=376' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 376 endSeconds: 463 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=376' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 474 endSeconds: 553 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=474' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 474 endSeconds: 553 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=474' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 563 endSeconds: 675 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=563' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 563 endSeconds: 675 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=563' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 687 endSeconds: 777 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=687' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 687 endSeconds: 777 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=687' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 777 endSeconds: 788 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=777' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 788 endSeconds: 855 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=788' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 866 endSeconds: 942 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=866' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 866 endSeconds: 942 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=866' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 958 endSeconds: 1058 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=958' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 1058 endSeconds: 1069 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YNJvm7t3yq8?t=1058' heldReason: rights --- # Why Your AI UX Is Broken (and It's Not the Model's Fault) — Mike Christensen, Ably SSE ties a response stream to a single connection. The user refreshes the page, walks out of WiFi range, or opens a second tab and the in-progress response is gone. Abort and resume are mutually exclusive for the same reason: the only signal a client can send over a one-way pipe is closing it, so the agent cannot tell the difference between a cancel and a disconnect. Vercel's AI SDK documents this explicitly. Mike Christensen from Ably makes the case for treating the session itself as a durable shared resource, decoupled from any individual connection, device, or agent instance. Clients subscribe to the session rather than to a request, so reconnects resume automatically, any tab or device has full visibility of live activity, and concurrent agents write independently without routing everything through an orchestrator. The demo shows all of this: multi-tab sync, a forced network disconnect that self-recovers, two agents running in parallel, and a handoff to a human support agent who joins the session mid-conversation with the full interaction history already visible. Speaker info: - https://x.com/christensencode - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikescottchristensen/ Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction to AI chat applications 0:51 Current implementation: Direct HTTP streaming and SSE 3:03 Three foundational capabilities for great AI products 4:34 Limitations of direct HTTP streaming 5:21 Introducing durable sessions 6:06 Resumability in streams 7:43 The conflict between SSE, resumability, and live control 9:13 Multi-device and multi-tab synchronization issues 11:12 Handling concurrent multi-agent architectures 12:54 Using Pub/Sub and Ably channels for durable sessions 14:12 Introducing Ably AI Transport SDK 15:34 Live demo of durable session capabilities 17:38 Handoff to human support agent --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/YNJvm7t3yq8-why-your-ai-ux-is-broken-and-it-s-not-the-model-s-fault Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/why-your-ai-ux-is-broken-and-it-s-not-the-model-s-f-04307218f0ee · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.