AGNTCon + MCPCon Japan 2026

The first wave of MCP adoption was defined by abundance. Every API endpoint became a tool, every workflow became a collection of tool calls, and many servers exposed hundreds of operations directly to agents. It worked, but at a cost: bloated context windows, slower tool selection, and increasingly unreliable agent behaviour.

But then Code Mode appeared!

With approaches Code Mode agents can search an API surface, generate code, and interact with services directly. If models can consume entire APIs and write code to acomplish a task, does tool design still matter?

In this talk, we'll compare three approaches to agent tooling: curated workflow-oriented tools, tool discovery and search, and Code Mode's search-and-execute model. Using real-world examples, benchmarks, and evals, we'll explore the trade-offs in reliability, latency, token usage, and task success.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for deciding when to consolidate tools, when to expose APIs, and whether the future of MCP is better tools or fewer tools altogether.