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Discussion on: MCP Transports Explained: stdio vs Streamable HTTP (and When to Use Each)

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Renato Marinho

Excellent breakdown — the stdio vs HTTP distinction is one of the most underexplained decisions in MCP right now. The tradeoff you describe (stdio for local simplicity, HTTP for production scale) holds for most cases.

One dimension worth adding: transport choice also affects how you handle streaming progress back to the agent. With Streamable HTTP you get native streaming, which opens up things like real-time progress tokens during long-running operations — something agents can use to decide whether to wait or abort.

We've been building mcp-fusion (github.com/vinkius-labs/mcp-fusion) which has a progress() generator pattern built in specifically for this. The framework supports both transports but the streaming story becomes much richer with HTTP. Good complement to what you're explaining here.