Mike Christensen

Staff Engineer at Ably focused on realtime infrastructure for production AI experiences. He spoke at AI Engineer Europe on why AI user experiences break at the transport/session layer and has written about durable sessions, AI Transport, stream resumption, multi-device continuity, and user control for customer-facing AI products.

AI Chat Needs Shared Sessions, Not Single Response Streams

Mike Christensen of Ably argues that many AI chat interfaces fail because they tie the user experience to a single streaming connection, not because the underlying model is inadequate. In his account, Server-Sent Events make common product behaviors such as refresh, reconnect, cancellation, multi-tab use and device switching brittle or ambiguous. Christensen’s proposed fix is to treat the AI session as a durable shared resource: clients and agents subscribe to and write into the session, so connections can drop, agents can run concurrently, and humans can join without losing context.

AI EngineerMay 17, 202611 min read