A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "I Mapped Every MCP Working Group, Interest Group, And Extension," Kin Lane, October 30, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/30/i-mapped-every-mcp-working-group-interest-group-and-extension/
Marisol read the post on a Friday afternoon, after the build had gone green and nobody wanted to start anything new. She builds internal tooling for a logistics software team, and her team's MCP server was the one thing she hadn't touched in months.
She started with the opening, where Kin Lane describes sitting in on a working group that stopped being one on October 16. It had become an interest group, and its Tasks work had moved to a renamed Tasks and Events Working Group. Marisol didn't follow the governance chatter as a rule. But she agreed with the line "Every thread I pull on in MCP right now leads back to the same place: the extensions model." Her own backlog had a few items she'd been calling someday features. She wondered whether they were really extensions waiting to happen.
Then she hit the paragraph that made her put her coffee down. Roots, Sampling and Logging had been deprecated by SEP-2577, and under the new lifecycle policy they had to stay deprecated for at least twelve months before removal. Her server used Logging. She wasn't sure about Sampling. Twelve months sounded generous, and she noticed she was relieved, then annoyed at herself for being relieved. A deadline a year out was exactly the kind she forgot.
The tables slowed her down. Twenty-two chartered groups, fourteen working and eight interest, with leads, slots, Discord channels and SEP numbers. She scrolled through them the way she scrolled through a vendor pricing page, looking for her own situation and not quite finding it. She admitted to herself that she didn't want a map of the whole country. She wanted to know whether her small server was going to break.
The part she disagreed with was the leadership count. The post says Anthropic holds 10 lead or facilitator seats and Bloomberg holds 8, and calls it "a lot of load resting on a small number of shoulders." Marisol read that as a warning. She also wondered whether it was just what a volunteer standard looks like in its first couple of years, with the people who show up ending up in charge. The post says outright that it isn't a criticism of the people doing the work. She believed that and still felt uneasy, because she couldn't tell whether the concentration was a problem or only a fact. She decided the post hadn't answered that, and that it probably wasn't trying to.
What stuck with her was the calendar section. The Gateways Interest Group had held 41 meetings, and there was "no charter for it in the repository." Her team had been following gateway discussions for a different reason. She hadn't known they were happening without paperwork behind them. That felt like a small lesson in not assuming that what's official and what's active are the same thing.
She didn't join anything. She didn't write to anyone or open a pull request. She did open the repo's search for the server's own code, typed the names of the three deprecated features, and read what came back. Logging showed up in four places. Sampling showed up in none.
Then she added a note to her team's tracker listing those four locations, with a date eleven months out to decide what replaces them. She closed the tab and went to find out whether anyone else on the team had noticed.