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7/25/2026
Transport, Surface, Skin: Building MCP Plugins That Survive the Spec

Transport, Surface, Skin: Building MCP Plugins That Survive the Spec

Short summary

The upcoming July 2026 MCP spec revision makes the protocol stateless, removing handshake sessions and standalone stream endpoints. Servers become pure functions compatible with edge runtimes like Cloudflare Workers and Deno Deploy. The author proposes a three-layer architecture—transport, surface, and skin—as separate contracts for building maintainable MCP plugins.

  • •MCP spec goes stateless: no more session IDs or handshake
  • •Servers become pure (Request, Token) -> Response functions deployable on edge runtimes
  • •Three-layer plugin architecture: transport, surface, skin as independent contracts

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