Moving ahead without waiting on long tasks
Anthropic announced on Oct. 23 (Oct. 24 Japan time) that its programming tool "Claude Code" now supports "Tasks" and "Elicitations," new features of MCP. MCP is a common standard for connecting external data and tools to AI. The announcement was made by @ClaudeDevs, the company's X account for developers.
Until now, when Claude asked a tool to perform long-running work, it had to wait until the work was finished. With Tasks, the tool returns a "ticket number," and Claude continues with other work without waiting. When the work is finished, it receives the results. The ticket number persists even if Claude Code is restarted.
Checking with the user midway
With Elicitations, a tool can ask the user for confirmation or input partway through a task. In Claude Code, the request appears on screen as a small input field, and processing continues once the user answers. Combined with Tasks, a tool can ask the user for just the information it needs in the middle of a long-running process.
Anthropic's David Soria Parra, a co-creator of MCP, revealed the support in a keynote at an industry event on the 22nd. Database company Upstash released a supporting component the day after the announcement.
Command-line version first
The features are available first in the command-line Claude Code (version 2.1.304 and later), the Agent SDK development kit and runs on GitHub Actions, on an experimental basis. They are not yet available in the VS Code extension or the desktop app. Anthropic says it will extend them to other products but has not given a timeline. They cannot be used through other companies' clouds, such as Amazon's Amazon Bedrock.
