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Durable, Asynchronous, and Tricky: Implementing MCP Tasks in Practice - Cornelia Davis, Temporal#

MCP Dev Summit North America 2026 digest Program Core pick 2–3 April 2026

Abstract

Cornelia Davis, Developer Advocate, Temporal

  • Why: MCP Tasks (introduced Nov 2025) add first-class async semantics to the protocol — the distributed-systems hard part of agent infrastructure, and the piece anyone running long-lived operations (deploys, batch jobs, remediation) will hit first.
  • What: What the Tasks spec requires and deliberately leaves open (how durability is achieved), and the hard corners in practice: clients or servers restarting mid-task, stable task identity and rediscovery via tasks/list, mismatched sync/async expectations, idempotency, polling, backpressure, error handling across retries, and human-in-the-loop on input_required without tight client-server coupling (from abstract only).
  • How: Durable state behind ephemeral connections plus idempotent task design — concrete implementation practices layered on the Task lifecycle, TTL, and state model the spec defines.
  • Where applicable: Anyone building long-running MCP clients or servers; protocol-level practices, though note the speaker's employer (Temporal) sells durable execution, so expect that lens on the durability gap the spec leaves open.