AI / Agentic AI Interview Questions
Why do MCP servers remain stateless in the recommended architecture pattern?
In the common MCP architecture pattern, the MCP server acts purely as a stateless provider of tools, resources, and prompt templates, while the MCP client hosts the actual LLM runtime and agent logic that decides what to call and when.
- A stateless server can be reused and replaced without worrying about losing session-specific state
- Keeps the decision-making logic centralized in the client, which simplifies reasoning about what the agent is actually doing
- Makes the server simpler to scale, since any instance can serve any request without needing shared session context
This isn't a hard requirement of the protocol itself, some architectures do run LLM logic on the server side for centralized control, but the stateless-server pattern is the simpler, more common default when strong dynamic orchestration isn't a priority.
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