Agents accumulate context and session history over hours or days, but all of it can vanish in an instant. We deployed multiple agent harnesses like Claude Code and Hermes on Kubernetes and found they all break in similar ways: unrecoverable sessions and silent state loss. Existing harnesses assume stable filesystems and process continuity - assumptions Kubernetes violates. This infrastructure mismatch is a problem no individual harness will fix.

This talk presents platform patterns for managing agent state. We cover where existing primitives stop and what agents actually need from platforms, like durable sessions that survive node failure and state that follows the workload from local development to cloud. We demonstrate crash recovery progressing from “everything is lost” to transparent session resume and outline the future of state governance. Participants will leave with an adoptable Kubernetes-native reference architecture to support state-rich agentic workloads.