[yompal]

MCP is great for the stateful systems, where shared context is a benefit, but this is a rarity. Developers generally write clients to use APIs in a stateless way, and we want to help this majority of users.

That said, agents.json is not mutually exclusive to MCP. I can see a future where an MCP for agents.json is created to access any API.

[winkle]

I think MCP being stateful is true in the short term. It's currently at the top of their roadmap to add to the protocol https://modelcontextprotocol.io/development/roadmap.

[yompal]

We've been keeping a close eye on this topic: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/specification/discus...

The options being considered to do this are:

1) maintain a session token mapping to the state -- which is still statefulness

2) create a separate stateless MCP protocol and reimplement -- agents.json is already the stateless protocol

3) reimplement every MCP as stateless and abandon the existing stateful MCP initiative

As you can tell, we're not bullish on any of these.

[esafak]

Isn't the idea to create a data lake to better inform models? Why are you bearish on stateful protocols? Could you elaborate on your thinking?

[yompal]

Bearish on everyone needing to be on stateful protocols. Developers should have the option to have their state managed internal to their application.

[esafak]

Can't you simply use a stateful protocol and not report any state? Doesn't statefulness subsume statelessness? I am beginning to wrap my head around this space, so excuse the naive questions.

[yompal]

No worries! In other cases, I believe you would be right. But splitting up context is not optional with MCP. Part of the whole state will always reside in an external entity.