MCP Tasks (async): Why Aren't Any Agents…

Terms in this piece · Glossary

MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.

Why it matters

Long-running tool calls fail in exactly the ways distributed systems always have, and there is already a spec for it going unused.

Key quotes

“stateful protocols are the absolute worst thing in large-scale distributed systems”
Cornelia Davis

“Spoiler alert, there is no filter on that endpoint. So, you would have to go through a million tasks to find the one that you're looking for”
Cornelia Davis

“once you've locked launched a task it has to be durable”
Cornelia Davis

“if I've got a million tasks running, I've got a million clients that are doing gets against each and every one of those tasks. That does not scale.”
Cornelia Davis

“Just because you can doesn't mean you should.”
Cornelia Davis

Intel

MCP Tasks (async): Why Aren't Any Agents Supporting Them? — Cornelia Davis, Temporal