The "Stateless" AI Era is a Massive Engineering Tax

We have spent a decade watching hackers grind through the same 48-hour cycle at MLH: build something brilliant, realize it has the memory of a goldfish, and then watch it break the second a user tries to do something complex. It is a mess. We keep pretending that stateless prompts are enough. They aren't. We are tired of seeing great projects die because the "plumbing"—the session logic, the vector database, the state management—swallows 80% of the weekend. It is an engineering tax that student developers should not have to pay. State Management and AI Memory for Developers Did you know the "stateless" AI era is actually a huge bottleneck? Most builders are just stitching together fragments of history and hoping the LLM doesn't lose the thread. It is fragile. We have realized that to move past simple chat wrappers, you have to start with the memory. You should not have to rebuild your entire logic layer just because you want to switch from GPT-4o to Claude. Integrating Backboard.io: Th