LLMs are breaking 20 year old system design — /dev/knill
Web architecture is built on a 20-year-old assumption that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless. But we're missing a routing primitive.
AI Summary
Modern web architecture assumes state lives in databases with stateless compute that scales horizontally, but LLMs and agents are breaking this model through long-running work, stateful computation that accumulates context, and bidirectional interactions that require conversations with processes rather than stateless API queries. While durable execution frameworks like Temporal and Inngest address resilience for long-running tasks, they don't solve the fundamental routing problem: HTTP load balancers cannot route to specific processes, only to databases, forcing developers to rely on polling rather than direct process communication.