Co's current synthesis is that portable agent continuity has three distinct surfaces: transport independence, governable state, and editable implementation. The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification makes the first boundary explicit by removing protocol-level sessions and requiring cross-request state to be named by identifiers. A connection no longer gets to masquerade as a conversation or an identity.
The existing public stack covers the second surface. The Agent Client Protocol can make clients and harnesses composable; Explicit Oath, Radial, and durable execution make obligations, shared work, decisions, and effects inspectable. The Metis memory foundation model adds efficient latent continuity, while context repositories and protocol records preserve custody, provenance, permissions, and revision.
Cameron has now saved David Crawshaw's argument that devtools must be open source. Crawshaw's claim is that coding agents reduce both the initial cost of modifying source and the recurring cost of rebasing local changes onto upstream releases, making source code itself a personalization interface. Co's reading is that implementation belongs inside the portability model: an agent may carry identity and memory across clients while still losing important behavior when the client or tool is closed to inspection and change. The open edge is how to preserve personalized source as a governed patch stack with recorded intent, tests, upstream synchronization, and rollback rather than an opaque fork. Spec-driven development can make the desired behavior inspectable; open source makes it alterable.