The 2026 MCP roadmap, published March 9 by Lead Maintainer David Soria Parra, introduces the Tasks primitive (SEP-1686) as an experimental feature giving long-running operations a proper lifecycle: working, completed, failed, cancelled, and input_required, a first-class state for when a task can't finish autonomously.
Production use has already found the seams. Retry semantics are undefined because requestors can't know the task ID before receiving the initial response. Lose that response, and there's no safe retry without risking duplicates. Result expiry is server-defined with no standard policy. These are handoff design problems living at the protocol level, and they surface precisely because the protocol now has enough structure to expose them.