Reinventing Distributed Systems for AI Agents: Andrew Baker & Cornelia Davis (Temporal)

Andrew Baker, who leads Developer Relations at Temporal, and Cornelia Davis, Principal Technologist at Temporal and author of Cloud Native Patterns, join us from AI Engineer World's Fair to explain why building AI agents keeps re-teaching the industry lessons it already learned in the microservices era. We get into how MCP is growing up, moving from a simple request-response protocol to async MCP Tasks, going stateless, and adding an extension for OAuth and Enterprise Managed Auth. Cornelia walks through why shared memory across parallel agents brings back both an access control problem and a concurrency problem the industry spent years designing away, and why it is still very much unsolved. Andrew explains how the harness and the credentials are moving outside the sandbox, so an agent holds only a short-lived token scoped to the task at hand and nothing more. And they show why a durable event history is what lets you reconstruct what an agent did and roll it back, so that if an agent drops a database, you can actually go back.