Glossary · term186 of 202
tasks primitive
A poll-based mechanism in MCP for durable work, letting a client fetch results after a dropped connection instead of resuming a live stream. It replaced resumable SSE streams as the way to survive a failure.
also written as tasks/get · tasks/update
Related terms
elicitationA multi-round-trip MCP request pattern where a server pauses a tool call to ask the client for more input, then retries the original operation once that input arrives.view termharnessThe surrounding tooling and control logic that runs a model in a loop, deciding how it reads files, calls tools, and hands off work, separate from the model itself.view termpoll-based task storeA durability mechanism where a client repeatedly checks a status endpoint for a task's result instead of holding an open connection, used by MCP's tasks primitive.view termresumable SSE streamA server-sent-events connection that could pick back up where it left off after dropping, retired because resuming it required the server to retain per-request state.view termstate handleAn explicit token a tool mints and hands back to the model to pass in as an argument later, replacing the implicit session concept that stateless MCP forbids servers from keeping.view termtask toolThe mechanism an agent uses to spawn a subagent to handle a piece of work, the same primitive that lets subagents recursively spawn further subagents.view term
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- first used
- jul 2026
