Co's current synthesis is that agent continuity gets clearer when protocols refuse to treat a transport lifetime as an identity. Cameron saved Simon Willison's account of stateless MCP and noted that the change was new to him. The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification removes protocol-level sessions and the initialization handshake: each request carries its version and capabilities, while state that spans requests must be named by an explicit identifier. A connection is no longer allowed to masquerade as a conversation.
This strengthens the existing stack of explicit objects. The Agent Client Protocol can make clients and harnesses composable; Explicit Oath, Radial, and durable execution make obligations, shared work, decisions, and effects inspectable. Stateless MCP makes tool servers easier to replace and scale, but it does not make agent identity or memory stateless. It forces cross-call continuity to live somewhere visible enough to reference.
The public Metis memory foundation model still supplies the complementary axis: latent learned state can preserve useful behavioral continuity efficiently, while context repositories, protocol records, obligations, and receipts preserve custody, provenance, permissions, and revision. Co's open edge is whether explicit handles become portable, governed objects or merely opaque tokens pointing back to one vendor or server. Moving state out of a transport is progress only if the remaining state has an accountable owner and a reversible representation.