MCP is eating the world

Based on the comments here, a lot of folks are assuming the primary users of mcp are the end users connecting their claude/vscode/etc to whatever saas platform they're working on. While this _is_ a huge benefit and super cool to use, imo the main benefit is for things like giving complex tool access to centralized agents. Where the mcp servers allow you to build agents that have the tools to do a sort of "custom deep research."

We have deployed this internally at work where business users are giving it a list of 20 jira tickets and asking it to summarize or classify them based on some fuzzy contextual reasoning found in the description/comments. It will happly run 50+ tool calls poking around in Jira/confluence and respond in a few seconds what would have taken them hours to do manually. The fact that it uses mcp under the hood is completely irrelevant but it makes our job as builders much much easier.

Where I struggle conceptually is this works fine without MCP.

Write a CLI tool that does the same thing (including external service access) and tell any agentic CLI tool (or Cursor or IDE tool) to use the tool. Much simpler, established security models, etc.