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MCP at 18 Months: Protocols, Patterns, and What We Didn't See Coming - Shaun Smith, Hugging Face#

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

Abstract

Shaun Smith, Open Source Agents / MCP, Hugging Face

  • Why: Hugging Face runs thousands of AI applications with MCP interconnectivity and supports Remote MCP via Inference Providers — a useful vantage point on where agentic inference, compute, and storage workloads are actually shifting.
  • What: An experience-based session covering how ACP and Open Responses work within HF's MCP infrastructure, where Skills and code generation fit, multi-model environments and why subagent patterns matter for certain tasks, observed trends in agentic and inference workloads, and multimodal/mixed-content demands (from abstract only).
  • How: Operating 1000s of MCP-connected applications and reporting on what the deployment experience shows about protocol coexistence and workload drift.
  • Where applicable: HF-specific deployment scale, but the workload-trend observations are ecosystem-wide signal for anyone capacity-planning AI serving infrastructure.