MCP Dev Summit Mumbai 2026

Everyone's heard the AAIF framing: MCP handles agent-to-tool, A2A handles agent-to-agent. Clean in theory. In practice, every multi-agent system lives at the boundary of both, and that boundary has no standard.
Context gets dropped. Errors go silent. A state that survived an entire A2A task lifecycle vanishes the moment it crosses into an MCP tool call. Nobody is talking about this publicly.
This session replaces the "vertical vs horizontal" mental model with something more honest: a precise seam diagram showing what each protocol guarantees, what it doesn't, and what falls into the gap. We'll go deep on MCP's Tasks primitive (SEP-1686)- including its two admitted gaps: no retry semantics, no expiry policies. We'll map the real failure modes developers are hitting today, drawn from open GitHub issues across both protocol repos.
Then a live demo using Google's open-source A2A sample repo: no custom code. We'll run a real multi-agent task, cross the protocol boundary, sever the trace header, and watch the silent failure happen in real time.
You'll leave with a clear mental model, a three-point failure checklist, and a concrete picture of what the spec needs next.