Unveiling Full Capabilities of Model Context Protocol (MCP): Achieving Rich Stateful Interactions

Unlocking the transformative potential of Model Context Protocol (MCP) in building stateful interactions, from discovering and managing tools to leveraging AI-powered language models.

1. The speaker works on Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and will be discussing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for development purposes.
2. The MCP ecosystem is growing, with much excitement and collaboration, but there is still more work to do as it's early in its development.
3. The first in-person gathering of the MCP steering committee occurred during the MCP Dev Summit, 10 days prior to this talk, demonstrating how new the ecosystem is.
4. There are gaps in how MCP is being implemented, with many people treating it as just another API wrapper rather than utilizing its full potential.
5. The speaker aims to highlight hidden capabilities and demonstrate how to unlock them for richer interactions between agents.
6. Tools reflect actions and can be easily mapped to function calls if you're used to that method. However, tools can lead to quality problems, as highlighted by research from Langchain.
7. Clients provide extra controls like per-chat tool selection, keyword accessibility, and reusable tool sets to help manage the number of tools available.
8. The MCP spec includes dynamic discovery, which enables servers to provide additional tools on the fly based on context.
9. Dynamic tool discovery can enhance user experience by adapting to the user's current situation, such as in a game where certain tools become available only when needed.
10. In the future, MCP may enable additions of context and return references to files rather than giant file transfers, providing more dynamic and stateful interactions.
11. Sampling is an underutilized and fun-to-use MCP primitive that allows servers to request language model completions from clients.
12. With sampling, agents can perform tasks like summarizing resources into tangible things or formatting a fetched website into markdown for the language model.
13. Developers should work on improving the developer experience when working with MCP servers, including debugging and logging features.
14. VS Code now includes dev mode and an attached debugger for MCP servers, making it easier to develop and debug these servers.
15. It's essential to stay updated on the latest spec and provide feedback on draft proposals to ensure they become stable and useful.
16. The community registry is addressing discovery issues by creating a centralized hub for finding MCP servers.
17. Elicitations, coming in the next draft, will allow tools to request specific input from users when needed.
18. Progressive enhancement in MCP is possible with best practices and reference servers showcasing stateful servers' capabilities.
19. To contribute to the ecosystem, users should read open RFCs, provide feedback on issues, and engage with their favorite clients and SDKs.
20. The interoperability gap will close as more users share their experiences and best practices with the community.
21. Users are encouraged to create action-oriented, context-aware, semantic-aware services using the full MCP spec.
22. Attendees should contribute to the ecosystem by reading open RFCs, providing feedback on issues, and sharing their experiences.
23. The speaker emphasizes that users have more influence over clients and SDKs than they might realize, encouraging them to engage with these tools.
24. By working together and leveraging MCP's full potential, the ecosystem can unlock a transformative future for all involved.

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

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