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.

Sure, and MCP is just a standardized way of exposing tools. This is where I feel MCP is both overhyped (waaaaaaay too much LinkedIn influencer hot air) but also genuinely quite useful.

I've done stuff very much like the above with just regular tool calls through the various LLM APIs, but there are tons of disparate frameworks for how to harness up a tool, how they execute, how they are discovered, etc. None of it is rocket science.

But the nice thing about having a standard is that it's a well-lit path, but more importantly in the corporate workflow context is that it allows tools to be composed together really easily - often without any coding at all.

An analyst who has zero coding experience can type in a prompt, click "add" on some MCP tools, and stand up a whole workflow in a minute or two.

That's pretty cool.

And yeah, none of it is impossible to implement yourself (nor even very hard!) but standardization has a value in and of itself in terms of lowering barriers to entry.

xkcd 927, every single time