AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026

People frequently assume MCP requires tools to be dumped straight into the system prompt, and responses to be returned straight to the model. Critics say the protocol has a context problem, that CLIs and agent skills are more efficient and composable. They're right about the symptoms, but wrong about the diagnosis. The problem isn't MCP - it's for a long time few had applied serious context engineering to it.

Through a self-built agent harness (mcpi), I will demonstrate three complementary strategies for progressive tool discovery over MCP - each paying only the context tokens it needs.

This talk focuses on the most transformative of the three: skills over MCP that describe the tool surface, and progressively enable tools upon skill invocation. I will also look at MCP CLIs and Code Mode approaches, and show how they can complement each other with their different strengths.

Attendees will leave with practical patterns they can implement in their own MCP servers and agent harnesses today.