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World's Fair 2025

Full Spec MCP: Hidden Capabilities of the MCP spec — Harald Kirschner, Microsoft/VSCode

Harald Kirschner

Overview

This talk explores the underutilized capabilities of the Model Contract Protocol (MCP) beyond basic tool calling. It highlights how embracing the full MCP specification can unlock richer, stateful interactions for AI agents. The presentation emphasizes that while many are shipping products quickly using only tools, the spec offers advanced features like dynamic discovery, resources, and sampling that enable more sophisticated agent behavior and development experiences.

Who should watch

Key takeaways

Notable quotes

*The message is if you go with full MCP spec support, you will can unlock these rich stateful interactions that MCP vision is really outlining on how agents should work together.*
*It's really quality over quantity and clients handle that somewhat.*
*Sampling is one of the oddly named primitives as well. And if it had a better name, maybe more people would use it.*

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Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.