MCP provides a convenient packaging for tools, and generally workflows, for LLM clients.
You can debate all day whether bringing your own tools is a good thing vs giving the LLM a generic shell tool and an API doc and letting it run curls. I like tools because it brings reproducibility.
MCP is really just a json RPC spec. json RPC can take place over a variety of transports and under a variety of auth mechanisms- MCP doesn't need to spec a transport or auth mechanism.
I totally agree with everybody that most MCP clients are half assed and remote MCP is not well supported, but that's a business problem
Every LLM tool today either runs locally (cursor, zed, IDEs, etc.) so can run MCP servers as local processses w/ no auth, or is run by an LLM provider where interoperability is not a business priority. So the remote MCP story has not been fleshed out
You can debate all day whether bringing your own tools is a good thing vs giving the LLM a generic shell tool and an API doc and letting it run curls. I like tools because it brings reproducibility.
MCP is really just a json RPC spec. json RPC can take place over a variety of transports and under a variety of auth mechanisms- MCP doesn't need to spec a transport or auth mechanism.
I totally agree with everybody that most MCP clients are half assed and remote MCP is not well supported, but that's a business problem
Every LLM tool today either runs locally (cursor, zed, IDEs, etc.) so can run MCP servers as local processses w/ no auth, or is run by an LLM provider where interoperability is not a business priority. So the remote MCP story has not been fleshed out