Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)
The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification turns MCP from a bidirectional stateful protocol into a stateless request/response one, retiring the initialize handshake and session id so any request can land on any instance behind a plain load balancer.
Marked critical by the editors; it stays in this band.
On this page10 sections
The editors' notes below — why it matters, the context, the learning path — are written in Chinese.
Record
The signal
#Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024, had a huge spike of interest through much of 2025, and then became somewhat eclipsed by Skills (another Anthropic invention) when it became apparent that an agent harness with access to a terminal and curl could do most of what MCP did in a more flexible way. I wrote about that in my review of 2025. I'm coming back around to MCP now. Giving an agent a shell environment with the ability to access the internet is fraught with risk, and requires a strong model that is capable of effectively driving such an environment. MCP tools are easier to audit and control, and simple enough that smaller models that run on a laptop can st…
Why now
Why it matters
#MCP 服务器此前必须维持会话状态，所以扩容要么粘连会话、要么共享存储，这一条挡住了不少生产部署。无状态化之后，MCP 服务器变成普通的无状态 HTTP 服务，可以直接放在轮询负载均衡后面。这是部署形态的改变，不是功能增补。
Background
Technical context
#无状态化的代价落在服务器一侧：能力协商从一次握手变成每个请求自带，服务器要接受重复信息换取实例无关性。采样与征询这类服务器发起的请求原本依赖常开双向流，现在改用多轮往返表达。列表响应加了缓存提示与确定顺序，是为了让客户端缓存工具目录时，上游模型的提示缓存不会因为重连而整体失效。
Audience
Who should care
#Network
Where it sits in the network
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Further thought
Follow-up questions
#- 每个请求都携带协议版本与能力，在高频调用下带来的额外开销有多大？
- 工具目录缓存失效时，上游提示缓存的命中率会掉多少？
- 从动态客户端注册转向客户端元数据文档，对已有的自动注册流程意味着什么？
Publication record
Featured in
#The briefings that carried this signal, newest first; the last row is the weekly review of its week. The tag is the section it ran in.
技术简报 - 2026-08-01
Immediate attentionWeekly review · Jul 27 – Aug 2
Immediate attention
Sources