Agentdesk on The Farah Stack

Where Does Turn 12 Go? Load Balancing Agent Sessions

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep coming back to turn 12 of an agent session.

By turn 12 a session is carrying a lot: the whole conversation so far, whatever tools it loaded, maybe a streaming connection that’s still open to the customer’s chat window. And the most “scalable” load balancer setup there is, plain round-robin, hands that turn to whichever orchestrator instance happens to be next. Usually that’s a cold one, and it has to reload all of that context before it can say a single word back.

"Does It Scale?" Is Three Questions Pretending to Be One

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Someone asks “does it scale?” in a design review and everyone nods, and I’ve stopped trusting the nod. Usually each person in the room is picturing a different thing, and the system was only ever tested for one of them.

This is stop 1 in the Scalable Backends series. Every post threads through AgentDesk, a fictional platform where customer teams deploy AI agents that chat with their customers, call tools and run long sessions. It’s about to have a very good, very bad week.