On July 28th, the MCP maintainers shipped the 2026-07-28 revision. No more initialize. No more initialized. No more Mcp-Session-Id. David Soria Parra called it “MCP’s most important release since remote MCP first launched over a year ago,” and I couldn’t agree more. In the weeks leading up to the release, I had the opportunity to have Angie Jones on the podcast to talk through some of the changes, community, and excitement on Episode 80 of The Cloud Gambit Podcast - (have a listen!)
Open up the claude_desktop_config.json or mcp.json of the average AI tinkerer right now and tell me you don’t flinch. API keys sitting in plaintext. GitHub PATs with repo scope pasted next to a GitLab token that somebody will forget about in six months. A Slack bot token that absolutely should not be in a file backed up to iCloud. We collectively spent a decade teaching engineers not to do this - and then MCP showed up and everybody speed-ran the mistake all over again.
If you’ve spent any time building with MCP servers, you know the drill. You start with one server, maybe two. Then suddenly you’re juggling a dozen configurations across three different LLM clients, and your claude_desktop_config.json looks like it was written during a caffeine-fueled fever dream. That’s roughly where I was when I started building gridctl.
