Cornelia Davis explores the evolution of MCP Tasks, detailing the transition from v1 to v2. She highlights how v2's stateless protocol design supports durable, long-running agentic workflows by shifting durability responsibilities to the client and simplifying elicitation. The presentation includes a demo of a purchase order process and discusses future scalability enhancements through a notification-based approach.
Cornelia Davis explains why the MCP tasks specification, designed for durable, long-running, and interactive operations, hasn't seen widespread adoption. She details V1's architectural flaws, particularly concerning scalability and stateful human-in-the-loop interactions, and introduces V2's shift to a stateless core, client-initiated updates, and a clearer path for client-side durability, while outlining future work on scaling and adoption.
This talk explores the architectural shift required to build durable, long-running AI agents. It argues against traditional replay-based durability, proposing a two-part solution: treating LLM context as a durable, append-only log and managing the compute state (memory, files, processes) with OS-level snapshot and restore, implemented efficiently using Firecracker microVMs.