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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.