MCP Tasks (async)/ Why the heck aren't any agents supporting MCP tasks/async?
Cornelia Davis
- When
- Wednesday, July 13:20 PM – 3:40 PM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 8San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
The November 2025 MCP spec release introduced tasks, a way to make tool calls in an async manner. But more than 5 months later (an eternity in AI-time) there are still NO clients that support it - not Claude, not Codex, not even goose! I believe there are two reasons: Designing the client experience when there are potentially 1000s of background tasks running on their own schedule and engaging humans at unpredictable times is a challenge. And tasks place new infrastructure requirements on such a client. This talk will share the findings from having built against the tasks protocol and will suggest solutions these problems. Yup, we'll have a working client!
Speaker
Principal Technologist, Temporal
Cornelia's career has spanned several major shifts in software, from image processing algorithm development to web-centric computing in the late 90s, and then more than a decade working in cloud-native software, infrastructure and platforms (Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and friends). Those experiences in distributed systems, combined with a longstanding interest in programming models, led her to Temporal where she is helping to bring a new programming paradigm to an industry that was increasingly in need of one - a need that has accelerated dramatically with the advent of modern AI systems. Much of her work today focuses on the architectural needs and evolving practices of these AI systems. Her current research explores asynchronous processing and the development of AI-native distributed systems abstractions, with an emphasis on the emerging patterns and programming models shaping this new era of software. She is the author of Cloud Native Patterns: Designing Change-Tolerant Software.
More in Context Engineering
- Build-Time vs. Run-Time: Why Your Dev Tools Will Fail in ProductionWednesday, July 1 · 10:45 AM – 11:05 AM · Track 8
- It’s Tokens All The Way Down: How RLMs are DifferentWednesday, July 1 · 11:10 AM – 11:30 AM · Track 8
- 500 Skills, Zero Fine-Tuning: LinkedIn's Playbook for AI Agents That Actually Know Your CodebaseWednesday, July 1 · 11:40 AM – 12:00 PM · Track 8
- Your agents lack context: Here's how to fix "You're absolutely right!"Wednesday, July 1 · 12:05 PM – 12:25 PM · Track 8
- Prompt, Memory, Weights: The Architecture Decisions Most AI Teams Make by AccidentWednesday, July 1 · 12:05 PM – 12:25 PM · Expo Stage 4 SE
For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
- JSONEvery published session and speaker, in one request./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.json
- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
- Schedule XMLfrab / pentabarf — the format conference apps import./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.xml
- MCP + RESTPoint Claude at the programme. OpenAPI 3.1 included./agents
No key, no signup, CORS open. Everything here is generated from the same data the organisers edit.