MCP Dev Summit Mumbai 2026

Multi-agent MCP systems work beautifully in staging. They fail in production. We learned this the hard way: three agents, nine tools, accuracy that quietly degraded under real load, and a job that blew past its token budget before anyone noticed.

We weren't alone. Google DeepMind and MIT's December 2025 paper "Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems" measured up to 17× error amplification in naive multi-agent setups and found coordination yields negative returns past a saturation threshold. Separate work (MAFBench, 2025) shows framework design choices alone can cut planning accuracy by 30% and collapse coordination success from over 90% to under 30%. Most MCP deployments hit this wall and misdiagnose it as a model problem.

This talk walks through three failure modes - Infinite Loop, False Consensus, Silent Fallback with message traces, token costs, and detection times. We then introduce the "topology contract": a lightweight JSON schema embedded in MCP server metadata, compatible with the 2026 Server Cards roadmap. Additive to the spec, zero protocol changes.

Attendees leave with a reproducible benchmark suite and a schema they can adopt in an afternoon.