Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

WebSocket guarantees message order, but only within a single, open connection. When that guarantee breaks in production and not in local testing, the cause is almost always one of four things: The first is a genuine one-time fix. The other three are infrastructure you commit to operating, not patches you apply once. Deciding which situation you're in, and what to do about it, is what this piece covers.

Raw WebSockets drop connections, lose track of canceled responses, and don't natively reach a second device. If your AI streaming feature has been in production for a while, you've probably already built a fix for at least one of these and found another one waiting. Reconnection, cancellation, multi-device delivery, and crash detection are the four problems raw WebSockets leave for you to solve, and each is its own piece of infrastructure to build. Solve one, and the other three remain unsolved.

If you build an agent against OpenAI's Responses API then the simplest way to get output to the user is streaming over HTTP/SSE. If the user refreshes the page, loses connection, switches devices, or needs to approve a tool call, then there's nothing in the API to help you. AI Transport is Ably's session layer for agent-to-user conversations. An agent built on it gets resumable streams, multi-device sessions, and approval gates that wait for a human user, without deploying additional infrastructure.