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.

You're thinking like a SW engineer. Instead, think like someone who just happens to know a bit of programming. MCP is much, much easier than tool calling, I think.

As an example, I wrote a function in Python that, given a query string, executes a command line tool and returns the output. To make it an MCP server, I simply added type annotations to the function definition, and wrote a nice docstring, and added a decorator.

That's it. And now it works with all providers and all tools that support MCP. No REST APIs, etc needed. Not tied to a particular agentic tool.

Every time I've written a tool, I've ended up with "Wow, was it really that simple?"

As for security: If you write your own tool, the security implications are the same.