---
title: "MCP Apps: Give the Model Data, Give the User a UI"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-30"
time: "2:50pm-3:10pm"
track: "Context Engineering"
room: "Track 8"
speakers: ["Dustin Mihalik"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Context Engineering"
scheduleRoom: "Track 8"
scheduleLabels: ["Context Engineering", "Track 8", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# MCP Apps: Give the Model Data, Give the User a UI

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 2:50pm-3:10pm
- Track/room: Context Engineering · Track 8
- Speaker(s): Dustin Mihalik
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Context Engineering
- Room: Track 8
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
Most MCP tools return text. MCP Apps let you go further. But the real unlock isn't just rendering a pretty UI, it’s understanding that the model and the user need fundamentally different things from the same interaction. This talk presents a design pattern for building great MCP Apps: separate the data layer (what the model reasons about) from the display layer (what the user interacts with). When you do this well, the model retains full context and agency over structured data, while the user gets a rich, interactive interface. We'll walk through concrete examples of how splitting data and display unlocks capabilities that pure UI apps can't provide: letting the model make choices around display, answer questions based on interactions, and providing detailed displays and filters. Attendees will leave with a practical mental model for designing MCP Apps that are good for both the human and the AI. Attendees will learn patterns they can apply immediately.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[dustin-mihalik]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
The session explains MCP Apps as a way to add interactive UI to MCP-based workflows. It treats the MCP host as the place where tool data, model reasoning, and human controls meet.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[dustin-mihalik|Dustin Mihalik]] — Technical Fellow at [[indeed|Indeed]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agent-security]]
- [[mcp]]
- [[mcp-apps]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- [[mcp-app-runtime|MCP Apps As Agentic App Runtime]] — MCP Apps treats interactive UI returned from MCP servers as a runtime layer for agent-facing software.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.