Coding Agents Lunch & Learn – Session 20: MCP in Practice

Join us for Session 20 of the Coding Agents Lunch & Learn series as we continue exploring the rapidly evolving world of coding agents and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

We'll begin the session with a special featured presentation from Dimitrios Skarlatos, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Lithos. Dimitrios will explore why inference speed is becoming the defining bottleneck for AI agents and demonstrate how serving frontier open-source models at over 1,000 tokens per second fundamentally changes what's possible for agentic workflows. Through a live demo, we'll see how high-performance inference can unlock faster feedback loops, more capable agents, and entirely new development patterns.

Following the featured talk, we'll continue our exploration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the rapidly growing ecosystem of MCP servers powering modern AI applications.

After introducing the foundations of MCP in our previous session, we'll shift our focus toward practical applications. Together, we'll explore some of the community's favorite MCP servers, examine how they're being used in real-world agent workflows, and discuss what makes an MCP server useful, reliable, and production-ready. We'll also look at emerging benchmarks and evaluation efforts that help developers better understand the expanding MCP ecosystem.

The second half of the session will be an open, community-driven discussion where attendees can share experiences, discover new MCP servers, and exchange best practices for integrating tools into coding agents and AI applications. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, understanding the available servers and how to evaluate them is becoming just as important as understanding the protocol itself.

Whether you're building coding agents, AI assistants, developer tools, or simply keeping up with the latest advancements in agent engineering, this session is a great opportunity to learn from leading practitioners, ask questions, and exchange ideas with the community.

Bring your favorite MCP server recommendations, your experiences building with MCP, and your questions, we're looking forward to another great discussion.

Speakers

Leo Walker

AI Engineer @ KaiCare.ai

Rahul Parundekar

Founder @ A.I. Hero, inc.

Demetrios Brinkmann

Chief Happiness Engineer @ MLOps Community

Agenda

4:00 PM

4:05 PM

GMT

Opening / Closing

Welcome & Community Updates

Kick off Session 20 with community announcements, upcoming events, and an overview of today's discussions.

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4:05 PM

4:25 PM

GMT

Presentation

The Next Bottleneck for AI Agents: Why Inference Speed Changes Everything

Inference speed is rapidly becoming one of the defining constraints for modern AI agents. In this featured presentation, Dimitrios Skarlatos will explore how serving frontier open-source models at over 1,000 tokens per second unlocks entirely new possibilities for agentic workflows. Through a live demonstration, we'll examine how high-performance inference enables faster feedback loops, more capable agents, and new approaches to building production-ready AI systems.

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4:25 PM

4:45 PM

GMT

Presentation

Inside the MCP Ecosystem: Servers Every Agent Builder Should Know

Explore the growing ecosystem of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, practical implementation patterns, and community best practices for building production-ready AI agents.

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4:45 PM

5:00 PM

GMT

Breakout Session

What's Everyone Building? Agent Workflows, Tooling & Open Q&A

Close out the session with an open community discussion covering coding agent workflows, recently discovered tools, lessons learned, MCP experiences, and audience questions. Share what you're building, what's working, and what's next for the rapidly evolving agent ecosystem.

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