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.