The hard part didn't go away. It moved up a layer — with better marketing.

Last time, I told this crowd my agent forgot who I am. Distributed state problem — didn't know how to fix it yet.

I fixed it. Sort of. I gave it memory. It works — and it now rewrites system instructions on every turn to inject that memory back in. Prompt caching, gone. Latency, up. Still no clean answer.

Meanwhile the ground moved. What I hand-built last time — sessions, memory, early observability — managed platforms now do out of the box. The hard part didn't get solved. It moved: from inside the agent to the layer between the agent and everyone trying to reach it. A BFF standing in as security. CORS pretending to be auth.

I'll cover what solving memory actually cost, what's still unsolved (the side-effect problem is still a problem — ask me about a corrupted postcard), and the layer I didn't know existed until I went looking: gateways, policy enforcement, and the gap between "I deployed an agent" and "I deployed one I'd trust with someone else's traffic."

Still not perfect. But I know exactly which parts are engineering problems I've solved — and I can see the shape of the next one.

The hard part didn't go away. It moved up a layer — with better marketing.