Upstash has written the clearest status report yet on two MCP features most builders have not tried. In MCP Tasks and Events, Explained: Long-Running Tools and Agents That Wake Up, the post names the two blind spots of agents built on MCP. The first is time: “A tool call is a request that waits for a response,” and if the work takes minutes, “something gives up first.” The second is initiative: “Most agents only act when someone messages them or a cron job fires.” Tasks answer the first, Events the second. “A task answers ‘I asked, tell me when it’s done.’ An event answers ‘wake me when X happens.’”
There are no usage figures, and the post is unusually honest about how early this is. Tasks shipped as an official extension with the 2026-07-28 specification: a server answers a tool call at once with a handle, the client polls with a server-set interval, and states end in completed, failed or cancelled; “the client polls, not the model,” so a long job does not cost extra turns. Events “are newer and not yet a spec,” a sketch in a working group’s incubation repository with no formal proposal, though OpenAI shipped the webhook part in ChatGPT. As of October 7, the support table is mostly crosses: ChatGPT does not declare tasks, Codex has a feature request, and of the official SDKs only C# and Rust ship task support. On the server side, “no popular third-party MCP server emits events yet.” The toolkit Upstash ships adds both on top of the official TypeScript SDK, with signed challenges, Standard Webhooks signatures, retries with backoff and subscriptions that survive restarts.
The catalog holds the platform this runs on. The Upstash provider page lists 7 API pages, and durable task state and event subscriptions of this kind live naturally in the Upstash Redis REST API, with account-level work in the Upstash Developer API. The agentic access profile maps 10 operations, 5 of them acting. On the Agent Readiness score the MCP server and the full identity layer are lit, delegated identity, protected resource metadata and dynamic client registration.
The Kin Score is 36.3, thin band, with discoverability at 75.0 and access clarity at 55.3 against operational transparency at 2.6 and contract governance at 0.0. The Agent Readiness score is 42.1, agent-ready. The event surface dimension is unlit, on the record of a company that has just shipped a library for emitting MCP events with signed webhooks and retries. So are error semantics and idempotency, which are what a retried webhook delivery depends on. Upstash has built the push channel the protocol has not finished specifying. Its own contract has not yet described the events it would send.