AI Agents SF — What's Next for MCP?
Our one year anniversary meetup celebrates the key developments in Agentic AI — MCP and now its emerging rivals!
(1) MCP Talks Back: Interactive Agents in VS Code
Harald Kirschner, Microsoft
Most MCP servers fire tools and return text. What if they could ask questions, pause for approval, and render UIs? Live demo of elicitations, async tasks, and MCP Apps in VS Code—the primitives that make agents actually collaborative.
Harald Kirschner is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, building AI coding experiences in VS Code and GitHub Copilot for 40+ million developers. Before Microsoft, he led Firefox DevTools at Mozilla and helped ship Firefox Quantum. His engineering roots (MooTools, early web) keep him grounded in real developer problems. When not deep in MCP specs, he's hiking California's coast or making generative art.
(2) Dex: What Comes Next After MCP
Chetan Conikee
MCP is all the rage in Agentic AI, letting engineers be builders again. It harkens back to the microservices era. But the infrastructure for MCP adoption also reminds us of the blockchain — multiple frameworks want you to use their tiers and layers to communicate.
In this talk, Chetan Conikee, an engineer with a long storied history building deep tech, presents what comes after, and alongside, MCP — Dex.
Dex kills the MCP infrastructure tax with free, auto-generated adapters that connect agents to any API—GitHub, Stripe, Salesforce—without custom server development. It gives away the connectivity layer to own the intelligence layer: crystallized skills that eliminate redundant exploration across agent teams. One agent figures out "send Gmail with attachment," every subsequent agent executes it in 2 seconds instead of 30—a 93% time reduction, 97% token savings. Adapters are free because they're proxies to APIs customers already pay for. Skills are the business—procedural memory that compounds value with every agent interaction.
Website : https://getdex.sh/
Why Dex? : https://getdex.sh/what-is-dex
Research : https://getdex.sh/research
We are looking for more talks on the fundamental questions of Agentic AI platforms and protocols, especially whether a platform layer will hold. Comment with proposals or email us!