Europe 2026
Why Your AI UX Is Broken (and It's Not the Model's Fault) — Mike Christensen, Ably
Overview
This talk argues that the common direct HTTP streaming approach for AI chat applications fundamentally limits user experience quality. The default pattern, often using Server-Sent Events (SSE), creates a single, point-to-point connection between a client and an agent, which breaks down when users switch devices, experience network interruptions, or need to interact with a working agent. The presentation proposes a shift towards a decoupled architecture using durable sessions to enable more resilient, multi-surface, and interactive AI experiences.
Who should watch
- Product Managers and Engineers building AI-powered applications.
- Developers struggling with unreliable or limited AI chat interfaces.
- Teams looking to improve user experience for AI assistants and co-pilots.
- Anyone interested in the infrastructure behind scalable AI products.
Key takeaways
- Direct HTTP streaming, commonly used for AI chat, couples the response stream to a single client connection, leading to fragility.
- Resilient delivery, continuity across surfaces (devices/tabs), and live control are foundational capabilities for great AI products.
- SSE is a one-way protocol, creating a conflict between supporting stream resumability and enabling live control (e.g., cancellation).
- A durable sessions layer, acting as a shared, persistent medium between clients and agents, decouples them and enables richer interactions.
- This durable session pattern supports automatic stream resumption after disconnections, seamless synchronization across multiple devices, and allows any client to interact with agents in real-time.
- Multi-agent architectures can be simplified by allowing agents to write directly to a durable session, providing clients with unified visibility of all concurrent activities.
- Tools like Ably's AI Transport can implement this durable session pattern, handling complexity and providing features like automatic resumability and multi-client fanout.
Notable quotes
*The default pattern is to use direct HTTP streaming.*
*This paradigm is kind of fundamentally oriented on the idea of a single client establishing a single connection to a single agent.*
*The root cause is because everything is coupled to a single request.*
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