What if you don't need MCP at all?

MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense.

"What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!"

LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

Not only do you not need MCP, but you should actively avoid using it.

Stick with tried and proven API standards that are actually observable and secure and let your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints.

> No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

Claude and ChatGPT both support MCP, as does the OpenAI Agents SDK.

(If you mean the LLM itself, it is "known" at least as much as any other protocol. For whatever that means.)

>it is "known" at least as much as any other protocol.

No. It is not. Please understand what the LLM's are doing. Claude nor ChatGPT nor any major model knows what MCP is.

They know how to function & tool call. They have zero trained data on MCP.

That is a factual statement, not an opinion.

That is an easily falsifiable statement. If I ask ChatGPT or Claude what MCP is Model Context Protocol comes up, and furthermore it can clearly explain what MCP does. That seems unlikely to be a coincidental hallucination.

Training data =/= web search

Both ChatGPT and Claude will perform web searches when you ask them a question, which the fact that you got this confused is ironically topical.

But you're still misunderstanding the principle point because at some point these models will undoubtedly have access to that data and be trained on it.

But they didn't need to be, because LLM function & tool calling is already trained on these models and MCP does not augment this functionality in any way.

Claude gives me a lengthy explanation of MCP with web search disabled