Sometimes an AI agent can't finish a task without asking a person something.
Maybe it needs a deployment target. Maybe the user needs to sign in to another service.
MCP elicitation provides two ways to handle this:
📝 Form mode: collect structured input, such as choices or missing values.
🔗 URL mode: send the user to a browser for sign-in, consent, or other sensitive flows.
In my latest article, I explore how elicitation works under the 2026-07-28 MCP specification, including stateless retries, requestState, capability checks, and a working Python example using mcp 2.3.0.
One takeaway: design for the case where nobody is there to answer. Not every workflow can avoid human input, but unattended agents need a sensible fallback whenever possible.
How are you handling human-in-the-loop steps in your MCP servers?
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