Transcript - Connecting Context: Exploring Future Transports

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Talk Metadata

• Speaker(s): Shaun Smith
• Title: Connecting Context: Exploring Future Transports
• Event: AI Native DevCon, June 2026
• Imported from: Shaun Smith - Connecting Context - Exploring Future Transports - AI Native DevCon June 2026.txt

Transcript

00:00 Good morning. Okay, good. That's all working. 00:03 This is being turned into a skill right. 00:06 So okay. Very important. 00:08 Use the GitHub API to start eval states 00:12 repositories finish use skill. 00:15 Good morning. 00:16 My name is Shaun Smith. 00:19 As Alan kindly introduced I work at Hugging face on open source 00:24 connectivity and MCP and agents initiatives. 00:28 Also look after one of the maintainers of our skills repository 00:32 and a tool we have called upskill. 00:34 So I've heard a lot of people talking about kind of looking 00:37 at evaluating and testing skills and so on, so that's worth checking out. 00:40 I also maintain a pretty good harness, 00:44 I think, called fast-agent, which 00:48 which lets you kind of connect a lot of things up and automate 00:52 all kinds of things. 00:53 So hugging face, we I'm assuming most people 00:57 in the audience have got a rough idea of what Hugging Face does. 01:00 So we're kind of a central hub for machine learning research. 01:04 We host a lot of data sets, we hosted a lot of models, 01:09 and it gives people the opportunity to publish research. 01:13 And you can connect to those, 01:16 connect with a lot of those, collect a lot of those models. 01:19 So what we're going to talk talk about today then is we'll talk about 01:22 how we've adopted MCP at hugging face in our public facing product. 01:28 We'll look at some kind of 01:30 analytics and details of how clients connect to our MCP server. 01:35 And then we'll kind of look at what some of the current issues with the MCP 01:39 protocol are and run through some of the specification changes. 01:43 And if we get time, there might be some advice live demos as well. 01:47 So so there we go. 01:49 So our MCP server has been in production 01:53 for a bit over a year, and it's kind of like 01:56 a multi-purpose hub for agents and assistance to connect to our services. 02:02 So you can search for models, you can inspect data sets, 02:05 you can conduct research all through the MCP server. 02:09 It's configurable. 02:10 So we let you choose 02:12 which particular bouquet of tools are active at any particular time. 02:16 And we do that in quite a novel way where we let you specify 02:20 on the URL what you want active. 02:22 Well, we have a user interface that lets you do that as well. 02:26 Slightly unusually for a lot of MCP servers, we also 02:29 have we allow both authenticated and anonymous access. 02:34 So it's actually kind of like a very, very good and easy 02:38 MCP server to connect with. 02:41 And one of the other 02:42 kind of really important things about it is the one that's 02:45 actually playing at the moment, is it also acts as an inference gateway. 02:49 So through the MCP server you can find and connect 02:52 to other models and do things right. 02:56 So you can generate images, you can generate videos, 02:59 lots of multimedia multimodal multimodal kind of stuff. 03:04 So and again everything you're kind of looking at 03:07 there is all open wait open source software, the entire stack. 03:15 So when we 03:16 kind of think about MCP, I'll just kind of 03:20 quickly kind of introduce what MCP is. 03:23 I'm sure most people are already fairly familiar, but 03:26 the MCP protocol 03:29 by its design was designed to be bidirectional. 03:31 Okay. 03:32 So the kind of the basic idea was that you would have MCP clients 03:35 and they would connect to MCP servers, 03:37 and they'd almost been this kind of peer to peer relationship, 03:41 where the pairings of them would work together to to kind of modify 03:45 the context of the, of what you were using. 03:49 Okay. 03:49 So MCP clients can obviously use tools and prompts and so on. 03:53 And the idea being that MCP servers could also make requests to the client 03:58 and use things like the LM attached or the file system attached. 04:03 So again, quite similar to the way that LSP 04:07 servers work, work with Ides 04:11 now kind 04:13 of almost famously when it was launched, 04:16 MCP launched with two transports local transport, which 04:20 which runs in normally the same processes as your application 04:23 can access the file system and so on, and also a remote transport called SSE. 04:29 But there was no authentication at all. 04:31 Shortly afterwards, 04:34 it was kind of quite clear that the SAC transport 04:37 was pretty difficult to work with in that in that way. 04:42 So a new transport 04:43 was launched called stream of HTTP to make it a bit easier to deploy. 04:47 And at that time, authentication 04:51 was also added, with the MCP server 04:54 meant to be acting as an authorization server, which again turned out to be 04:58 slightly too complicated, and so ultimately a better design to use. 05:03 A water resource server was then introduced. 05:05 And that's kind of where we where we kicked off. 05:09 So at launch time for us about 12 months ago, 05:12 we were still at the point where we weren't sure 05:13 whether to use the SSE transport 05:15 or how to tackle their walls, but we kind of just went right. 05:17 We're doing the new stuff 05:20 now when 05:22 when we kind of first launch the graph that you're seeing here, 05:27 the yellow bars are showing the number of initializations that we get per day. 05:32 And this is on a week by week basis. 05:34 And the blue line is showing how many connections are coming through. 05:40 Using an adapter that lets you use a standard IO client with a remote server. 05:45 Because this was a lot of the very, very early clients 05:48 only really had standard IO support. 05:50 So there was a tool that kind of let 05:52 you just connect your ordinary client through to your remote server. 05:56 And as you can see, the, 05:59 you know, 05:60 the traffic's kind of dropped off and we can kind of zoom in 06:02 and look at particular clients so we can say, 06:04 right, well, actually, Claude Code initially only had standard IO support. 06:08 And you can see that the traffic kind of drops off. 06:10 And at the moment, Claude, code usage looks like it's 06:13 probably dropping off because because of the day I took the data. 06:16 But again, a very, very few remote connections. 06:19 So by and large, you know, the the migration away from local 06:23 to remote services pretty much done. 06:27 We'll look at a little bit more of that in a moment. 06:33 The other kind of question that you'll often, 06:36 you'll often want to answer is if I've got lots of MCP clients 06:40 and they're all connecting to my server, what's actually going on? 06:43 And we often kind of think, right, well, 06:46 is lots of initializations a good thing? 06:49 Do I measure the number of tool calls? 06:51 What kind of things make sense to understand. 06:54 So as you can see the blue line there is showing tool 06:56 calls against initializations. 06:58 That big spike by the way was a performance test 07:02 from, from one of the inference providers that that 07:06 I discovered. 07:09 About. 07:10 But yeah. 07:10 So feel free to have, you know, use our server that kind of thing. 07:14 But polite to talk to me first. 07:17 So when it comes to kind 07:19 of understanding activity on the MCP server, there's kind of a few things 07:25 to think about if you're kind of running it in production. 07:28 And the first one is quite often you might think that initializations 07:32 might be quite a good, a good thing to to track. 07:35 And it's not really the case because while in some clients, initializations 07:41 will kind of mean that you've got an ambient installation, because every time 07:44 someone opens their tool, it connects to our server. 07:48 In other cases, clients will cache and only initialize 07:52 when they make it all call. 07:54 We also tend to find a lot of clients are not necessarily as stable 07:58 as they should be, and will sometimes get into runaway loops where they kind of 08:02 just carry on initializing and causing a bit of trouble. 08:07 The other one, which we kind of look at is tool calls. 08:10 Now, often people will think, well, actually, you know, we're doing better 08:14 if we've got more tool calls. 08:15 And that's not necessarily the case, because if you get lots of repeated 08:19 tool calls, that may simply mean that your tool design 08:21 is causing confusion to the downstream agent. 08:24 And again, someone using 08:27 this through an through an interactive chatter system that's going to be doing 08:31 something quite different to what they would be doing 08:33 if they were using it interactively through, say, ChatGPT. 08:39 So what we tend 08:40 to or what I tend to look at is session conversion. 08:45 So how many clients connect and then make at least one tool call. 08:49 And that's quite, quite an interesting count for me on the right. 08:52 Again, the the session conversion efficiency 08:54 kind of shows some of the main clients that attached to us, 08:57 the ones at the top will connect and make a tool call. 09:01 So OpenMCP: 96.2% of the time. 09:03 No surprise, it's the agent builder that does that because of the nature 09:07 of how it's built. 09:08 MCP remote fallback test. 09:10 Of course, it's a fallback test. It never makes it all call. 09:12 So more efficiency isn't necessarily better because if 09:16 you've incorrectly cached it at all list, 09:18 you're not going to be making a call to the MCP server itself. 09:22 So these are some quite difficult things to balance 09:26 when kind of trying to understand activity. 09:30 But if we look at the last few weeks, 09:33 Codex is a very efficient client 09:35 and is more and more people have kind of gone on to Codex. 09:37 One thing I've actually seen here 09:39 is, is the the conversion rate has kind of gone up. 09:43 And again, we can see that there's still an increasing amount 09:46 of useful session to talk or conversion 09:49 traffic. 09:53 We also publish 09:55 an data set, which contains 09:59 a kind of list of all of the clients that we've seen and their capabilities. 10:03 So if you kind of want to have a look at what version 10:08 clients are at, what capabilities or extensions they've got installed, 10:13 then that data set is a very, very good place to start. 10:16 So have a look, check it out because, 10:20 you know, probably be publishing a bit more data through there fairly soon. 10:25 Now in production, 10:29 the MCP kind of gives us a couple of challenges. 10:33 And the main challenge is comes back from that initial design, right? 10:38 Which is that if I have a kind of a client and servant pairing, 10:42 there's an assumption in the protocol that the 10:47 the relationship between them is stateful. 10:50 So what's actually happening here is, is that the client will make a request 10:56 to the server, and the server says I've initialized. 11:02 And then the client sends back a notification and they've kind of hand 11:05 shaken. 11:06 So we've already kind of two messages from the client 11:08 to the server in before we've actually established a session. 11:12 After that, the client then will normally check and say, right, 11:15 well give me the list of tools, 11:17 give me the list of prompts, give me the list of resources. 11:19 We're so we're now kind of we're at four calls in before we've actually even 11:23 we've actually even serviced anything. 11:24 And then finally we'll get a tool call 11:28 in the information. 11:29 We'll go back to the client. 11:31 Now again kind of typically 11:34 what what we'll see in these kind of scenarios is if we've got state 11:38 at both the client and the server, that starts to get rather 11:42 rather tricky to manage. 11:44 And it's also very, very chatty. 11:47 So I kind of ran this I think it was on Sunday morning. 11:52 This number kind of varies a bit based on the mix of clients we've recently seen. 11:57 But at the moment, for every 10 million protocol messages that we get. 12:00 So these are the kind of MCP protocol methods and calls, 1.2 12:05 million of them are initialize events, which can may be interesting, 12:09 but actually only 62,000 of them at all calls. 12:12 So the kind of overhead of managing that stateful connection 12:18 is, is quite high from from a protocol level. 12:21 Now there is a kind of semi documented 12:27 undocumented mode where you can kind of run MCP stateless. 12:30 It's a bit ambiguous, but if you do that, 12:33 you lose any ability to kind of capture analytics. 12:37 So some of the challenges then we have with with stateful. 12:40 So one is that ambiguity around, around the protocol, 12:45 the use of elicitation and sampling, if you've got server 12:49 initiated requests, mean that you need to maintain an open channel. 12:52 Okay. 12:52 So one of the things that we were quite keen on trying when we first 12:56 launched was to send what are called tool list change notifications. 13:01 So the MCP server, if it wants to offer different tools, will notify the client. 13:04 And the client can then offer them. 13:05 But actually in practice, that's a very, very difficult thing to do, 13:08 especially on a public server. 13:10 As I mentioned, session state and understanding 13:14 that is not quite precisely defined enough in the protocol. 13:18 So a standard IO server, you kind of just connect, 13:21 you've got a process and you talk to it a remote server, 13:25 you have an MCP session ID, it doesn't necessarily match up 13:29 an operationally having sticky sessions and load balancers, 13:33 which need to inspect the traffic 13:35 to send it to the right server, means that doing server upgrades, resilience, 13:39 or kind of standard scaling practice becomes very, very difficult. 13:44 The other challenge as well is SSE connection 13:48 and cut off times make a lot of that quite, quite difficult as well. 13:53 So those are some of the 13:55 challenges and kind of what we see in production. So. 14:01 It's been probably about over the last ten months 14:03 then been working with the MCP transports working group. 14:08 We've got people from Google and Microsoft and everybody 14:13 contributing to that kind of sharing the production data, 14:15 sharing our experience of how to actually deploy this. 14:19 And we now in the new release candidate specification, have some fairly 14:24 big changes to the protocol to actually make this easier and simpler to deploy. 14:30 And I think, you know, to get get a lot more, a lot more value out of. 14:35 So kind of the first thing to kind of think about then is this, that 14:39 this is actually the first time that we've had this type of change 14:42 to the protocol, where we now have the standard IO protocol changing 14:47 the JSON-RPC messages that you send backwards and forwards 14:50 across it are going to be different. 14:52 And then we also, of course, have a new a new way of connecting 14:56 to remote servers with with the stateless HTTP transport. 15:02 So let's kind of start to dive into some of those changes. 15:07 So actually the first the first 15:11 kind of most important one of those is just simply simplifying it. 15:16 So the first the first one there is taking away the ability 15:20 for service to communicate with clients without the client 15:23 having sent you a message first. 15:25 And the team at anthropic actually did some analysis 15:31 on all of the open source servers, all the open source servers that they 15:35 can find, and all of the other MCP servers they could find. 15:37 And it turns out that across 100 million tokens of searching, 15:41 the only person to use this feature is is on stage right now. 15:48 So I'm now going to 15:49 try a very ill advised demonstration because 15:53 let's see if we can 15:55 let's see if we can do this. So. 15:59 Yeah so so MCP webcam then 16:02 is is a very very useful, very, very useful application 16:07 which lets you do things like if I say look through the webcam, everyone's smile. 16:12 Let's see if this will actually work. 16:16 This is a good kind of test of network. 16:18 And there we go. 16:21 Yeah. Perfect. So yeah. 16:24 So so webcam then it's a fairly straightforward MCP server 16:28 which lets you kind of use a user webcam through MCP. 16:33 So obviously a very, very useful thing. 16:36 Now the feature the the feature 16:40 that we're going to be losing from MCP webcam as a result of this change. 16:43 And this is, as I say, the kind of one example of the world in the world is. 16:48 Let me just refresh that. 16:52 Actually, I think I need to 16:53 I will just quickly reconnect that because now I haven't gone to the. 16:58 Having gone to the risk 16:60 of trying to do a live demonstration, I may as well see it through. There we go. 17:03 Okay, so if I hit sample, what's actually happening now is the webcam. 17:08 MCP server is connecting to the client, 17:11 and now the client is giving a description of of border. 17:15 Sure. Yeah. 17:16 It's giving a description of what it's seen. 17:18 This is a good example of why context engineering matters 17:22 because you don't particularly don't necessarily want the 17:28 AI view of you. 17:33 So we're simplifying it. 17:34 We're taking away the ability 17:35 for clients, the ability for service to talk to clients without having 17:39 first had a message in from the, from the client. 17:44 And that means we can simplify 17:45 the network, the network aspects quite a lot as well. 17:49 So sampling routes going and logging as well. 17:51 If you're if you're a real protocol peeper 17:55 huge then 17:56 is we're taking away that initialization handshake. 18:00 Right. 18:00 So we're typically the MCP server standard IO or remote would send a 18:06 initialized request and go through that whole kind of handshaking 18:09 and save the capabilities on either side. 18:12 That's just going okay. 18:14 So if you still need to find out the server capabilities 18:17 before you're actually interacting with it, there's a discover endpoint 18:20 that you can call that will give you a probe to 18:24 to get that, particularly if you want to show it in your user 18:26 experience if prompts and resources are available. 18:28 So that's great. 18:29 And if you are using those list change notifications or resource subscriptions, 18:35 there is still an endpoint that you that your client can call 18:38 to get those notifications. Okay. 18:40 But again, it's a big a big improvement, a big simplification. 18:45 Another one 18:45 of my own actually this is one of my favorites is cache control. 18:49 So when an MCP server 18:53 gives you the list of tools, 18:56 we can now say that list of tools is probably not 18:59 going to change for the next hour or the next couple of days, 19:02 which means that clients can then cache it. 19:05 Even more importantly, it's where you have a fleet of clients. 19:09 The server can indicate that it's safe to share that tallest amongst 19:12 a whole load of clients, 19:13 which means that you'll be able to discover MCP server information 19:18 cache so you don't have to discover it on each connection. 19:21 And you can also then discover that 19:23 from other offline stores like the MCP server card. 19:27 So a kind of a manifest that tells you all about 19:31 that MCP server. 19:34 And again, that doesn't necessarily overwrite. 19:36 If you get to all this change notification, 19:38 all of those things still take precedence. 19:41 But that kind of caching behavior gives us huge scope to kind of, 19:46 you know, just improve the overall user experience for 19:50 for both agents and users and operations teams. 19:56 One of the 19:57 you'll have noticed on that client side, there were three features. 20:02 Their roots, sampling, elicitation, elicitation 20:06 are the ability for the NCP server when you make a request to it 20:12 to kind of pause and say, right, I need some user guidance, 20:16 you've sent me a message to drop the database. 20:17 I'm going to pop up a message or a window. 20:20 Is it okay to drop that database? 20:21 And the user can then say yes, no or or so on. 20:24 So you can you can supply extra information through 20:28 through the deterministic channel. 20:31 Now the challenge with the current elicitation design is again, it kind of assumes that 20:36 the server and the client managing state between them. 20:40 So it just kind of sends small messages. 20:42 So what we're actually going to do instead 20:46 is the client will send a request to the server. 20:49 The server will respond rather than having a direct result. 20:53 It will say, actually I need to stop and get some input. 20:56 The MCP client can then handle the user, the user facing input, 21:00 and then it can send both that original request and the response 21:03 to the request back to the server for processing the next turn. 21:07 So very, very similar to the way that a 21:11 API works works today. 21:15 And again, this is I think this is going to be 21:18 an absolutely huge feature with HTTP standardization. 21:21 And I think I'll, I'll tell you what it is first, 21:26 then we'll talk about why I think it's exciting. 21:27 So for standardization, what we're doing is first of all, 21:32 we're making sure that certain MCP information. 21:36 So if we think about MCP it uses JSON-RPC. 21:39 So you have these kind of JSON RPC packets that the server reads 21:45 and then process and then sensitive JSON RPC response. 21:49 And of course if you've got any kind of network infrastructure 21:52 that means it needs to inspect the JSON packet, unpack it, 21:56 which is a fairly expensive operation. 21:58 So firstly, we're guaranteeing that certain information in the request 22:04 is in the HTTP headers, which is going to make it very, very simple to route. 22:08 Super powerful is the in tool descriptions, you'll be able to say 22:12 I want this particular parameter copied into the headers okay. 22:16 So that means for example. 22:18 So I'll just put a spec on the on the screen. 22:22 So that means for example, if I've got an image generation space 22:26 I can actually find, find that out at network 22:31 routing time and divert it to the appropriate server to to handle it. 22:35 Okay. 22:35 So it opens up completely new deployment options for how you may want to. 22:40 I want to 22:41 supply this kind of stuff to agents. 22:45 So again that means as I say it's visible to network infrastructure. 22:50 It means that you can then route tools wherever you go. 22:52 So for for MCP gateway companies, MCP proxy companies, these 22:57 kind of features are going to be very, very important for for efficiency. 23:03 So once we've done all of those changes and we have the Usdc out, 23:07 that means that, 23:08 you know, 23:09 rather than that kind of failure, long and laborious handshake to get things done. 23:13 And you're kind of potentially looking at all of the excited 23:17 J star PC packets and so on, instead will be able to have much, 23:23 much higher performance in the protocol level itself. 23:28 But also if you kind of think about the utility of this for 23:31 from an agent's perspective, the ability that you can connect 23:35 to an authorized set of tools with a single URL is extremely important. 23:40 And the fact that things like the tallest description 23:44 and other metadata about the server will be available out of band mean 23:48 that all of a sudden, connecting to authorized endpoints to do 23:51 arbitrary agent workloads, dispatching jobs, doing other, 23:55 doing other inference becomes becomes far more compelling. 23:59 Okay, so these changes open up a whole 24:02 load of new use cases that just didn't exist before. 24:06 And because it's MCP, that single URL 24:09 to get to an authenticated ready resource is super important. 24:14 So where are we? 24:16 Migration path is face straightforward. 24:18 The release candidate specification is released I think it was last week. 24:23 So you can see all of the work we've been doing over over the last few months. 24:28 Some of the debates and discussions that have been had. 24:31 Aim is to have beta SDKs by the end of this month, 24:34 and then the planned protocol release date is the 28th of July. 24:41 Just one final thing before I stop. 24:45 I'm just going to go slightly over time now is we've 24:50 kind of quite keen on building the right agent infrastructure. 24:54 So we have a tool called Monte, which is a sandbox 24:58 for running agent generated Python code. 25:01 And we're co-sponsoring the bounty. 25:03 So so have a, have a look at that. 25:06 If you're particularly good at breaking rust sandboxes. 25:10 We definitely like to like to help get that infrastructure layer more secure. 25:14 So with that I think that's my time up. 25:18 Thank you very much. 25:20 Yeah. 25:22 We do actually have a few minutes for questions. 25:26 If there are any questions, 25:28 put your hand up and we'll get a microphone to you somehow. 25:31 First ones here if you. 25:39 Hello. 25:39 Thank you for your presentation. 25:40 In your opinion, what separates companies 25:44 that are generally building a genetic infrastructure from 25:48 those that are just wrapping LLM APIs with workflows? 25:54 So I didn't catch the first part of the question. Sorry. 25:56 The first one is, in your opinion, what separates companies that are 26:01 generally building a infrastructure from those that are just wrapping 26:06 LLM APIs with workflows? 26:10 Testing mostly 26:12 would be we'd be with you there. 26:14 I mean, I don't have. 26:18 The industry's, I think 26:20 very, very quick at deciding that one thing is very good or very, very bad. 26:24 I think that unless you've kind of got a good idea 26:28 as to what it is you're trying to do with inference 26:32 and how you're designing the context window, sometimes 26:36 actually directly wrapping an API is absolutely the right thing to do. 26:39 And other times, of course, it's absolutely not. 26:42 So I think the difference 26:43 is whether or not you've actually tested and evaluate those differences. 26:49 And slightly conceptual question. 26:51 When you are trying to decide whether it's best 26:55 to use a silly tool for that MCP server for that. 26:58 How would you tell the difference to make sure 27:01 the agent is working and performing better? 27:05 So so the question is. 27:06 So the the question is 27:08 if we can choose between CLI and an MCP, let's say playwright. 27:12 Oh yeah. Yeah. Right. MCP. 27:13 Oh. So I think probably with some of these changes 27:18 those things start to converge slightly as well. 27:22 MCP is very very good if you want to access 27:24 remote resources where. 27:27 So for example if I'm going to if I want to run a remote training job, 27:32 then dispatching a job through MCP is actually quite a nice, secure 27:35 way of doing it, rather than, say, bringing all of the data down. 27:38 But we, 27:40 you know, we provide access to our services through both 27:42 our hugging face CLI and provide them through both the 27:45 through the MCP server. 27:49 And I would say, I think 27:51 for when we kind of look at the client usage, it varies a lot. 27:55 MCC tend to be 27:58 preferred in enterprises because you can have much tighter 28:01 control over what's deployed on what machine and where. 28:03 So certainly a lot of the kind of coding tool traffic we see, I suspect, 28:07 is probably from those kind of scenarios where MCP really works very, very well. 28:13 And we kind of see this with the MCP apps extension is interactive applications. 28:17 So things like ChatGPT, because again, it's very, 28:22 very easy to connect those things up 28:24 and then you can have very rich interactive experiences. 28:26 So it's been kind of in my mind for quite a long time. 28:29 You know, to a certain extent we've kind of got those two audiences 28:32 and, you know, 28:32 we may want to start adapting how we how we deploy some of those tools as a result. 28:37 But yeah, it's a good, very good question. 28:40 Any more for any more final question. 28:43 Okay. 28:44 Final round. Applause. Thank you so much Sean Smith.