MCP Tasks (async): Why Aren't Any Agents Supporting Them? — Cornelia Davis, Temporal
Cornelia Davis discusses MCP Tasks, a specification designed to enable durable, long-running asynchronous interactions for tools and agents that cannot complete in a single request/response cycle. The core challenge is maintaining state and functionality across infrastructure failures (network blips, process crashes) or human delays. While the initial V1 protocol was complex and stateful, the evolution to V2 significantly improves scalability by moving toward a stateless core and structured extensions, making it more viable for large-scale distributed systems.
Key takeaways
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The Problem of Long-Running Tasks
Traditional request/response models fail when work takes time. MCP tasks solve this by allowing an agent to invoke a tool, receive a handle, and interact with that handle asynchronously, surviving disconnections and crashes.
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Durability is Paramount
6:43
For the task to be reliable, it must be durable—meaning its state survives client disconnects, server outages, or human delays. This requirement adds significant complexity.
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V2 Moves Toward Statelessness
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The major improvement in the MCP Tasks V2 specification is its move toward a stateless core and structured extensions, addressing the inherent difficulties of managing stateful protocols in large-scale distributed systems.