AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026

MCP creates a common way for models to use tools, but production use still breaks down when reliability expectations are left implicit. This talk argues that MCP systems need explicit reliability contracts covering permission boundaries, tool-call semantics, retries, observability, and recovery behavior. It will show how multi-step failures emerge in real tool-use chains and how traces, evals, and protocol-aware safeguards can make those failures debuggable instead of mysterious. The session also covers design patterns for graceful degradation when tools, transport layers, or model reasoning do not behave as expected. Attendees will leave with a concrete framework for making MCP-based systems more trustworthy in real deployments.