Making (and Breaking) Agents by Adding 1,000 MCP Tools

What happens when you actually try to use MCP at scale? In this talk, I’ll build an agent live on stage, connect it to 1,000+ tools via MCP, and show exactly what breaks: context explosion, ambiguous routing, and security vulnerabilities from indirect prompt injection.

Then I’ll show how to fix it. I’ll cover dynamic tool discovery (reducing context from 500 tools to 1-2), code-mode execution, and why every MCP tool is a trust boundary your security team should care about.

This isn’t specifically MCP advocacy as thes issues go beyond MCP and affect any agent that needs tools (and any modern agent is very tool hungry). It’s a practitioner’s guide to what works (and doesn’t) when you scale MCP tools.