Stateless MCP 2.0 Spec Reignites Developer Interest
JeremyCMorgan · x · 2026-08-12
Prominent developer Simon Willison notes that the new stateless MCP (Model Context Protocol) specification has reignited his interest in the protocol.
Key Improvements in MCP 2.0
- Removes protocol-level sessions: The new 2026-07-28 spec eliminates initialization handshakes and session states.
- Infrastructure-friendly: Remote MCP servers can finally behave like normal HTTP infrastructure, greatly simplifying load balancing, serverless deployment, tracing, and caching.
Background on MCP Evolution
- MCP was originally introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 to provide a standard way for LLM agents to call external tools.
- During 2025, MCP was somewhat eclipsed by Anthropic's Skills, which allowed agents to execute tasks flexibly via terminal and curl.
- Willison argues that giving an agent a shell environment is fraught with risk and requires a strong model, whereas MCP tools are easier to audit and control, which is why he is bullish on MCP again.
Related event: MCP Undergoes Major Stateless Architecture Overhaul(3 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- DIRECT: retrieval-based next-question suggestions for conversational agents — burkov · 2026-10-16
- Claude Code and Codex now autocomplete the user's next action — tokenbender · 2026-10-16
- Hermes Agent ships official Reverse Engineer Anything plugin with one-command setup — Teknium · 2026-10-16
- MLExpert: 35B MoE Agent Trained to Autonomously Handle Machine Learning Engineering — Shangheng Du · 2026-10-16
- Cowork-Gym: Alibaba Synthesizes 64.9K Agent Work Environments, Boosting Qwen by 8.7 Points — Anni Zou · 2026-10-16
- MMSearch-OPD: Joint RL and On-Policy Distillation for Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agents — PekingUniversity · 2026-10-16