Lots of hype and debunking around MCP (Model Context Protocol) flying around lately. I’ve been working with it since launch and believe all of these are true:

1. MCP is complex, overengineered, hard to host in cloud, security model is nonexistent, weird naming, registries are messy, community is messy. All of that is rapidly improving, especially the technical shortcomings^{1 2}, but out of the gate it has some serious issues.

2. MCP is also by far the best current solution for “LLM plugins” or “SDK but for LLMs”. Everything else is either proprietary or involves us all writing the same code over and over. Why would we all write and debug and maintain the same approximate API-calling implementations? This is why SDKs exist too.

Most platforms w/ a serious API publish an OpenAPI spec and SDKs in popular languages like typescript, python, etc. I think we’ll all also publish an MCP server that lets you use the API via LLM right away too. These SDKs and servers could just be generated from the spec and an llms-full.txt. I’m willing to bet the LLM plugins (the MCP servers) will quickly become the most popular way to interact with those APIs.

Lastly: MCP servers aren’t restricted to HTTP APIs. Desktop apps (and maybe even mobile apps) can expose tools to LLMs, like we’re seeing with Blender MCP and Ableton Live MCP.

The tool-use-centric paradigm for LLMs is incredibly powerful, and made even more powerful when run through battle-tested expert systems. Instead of doing a one-shot “make me a 3D model of pikachu with a sword,” I can have an interactive chat with Blender and work incrementally and within the well-defined rules of a domain-specific piece of software. In the same way that it doesn’t make sense for all of us to reimplement the same API-calling code over and over, it makes sense to leverage the years of work that have gone into existing creative software. Eventually I imagine you’ll see an LLM built-in to pretty much every piece of software, cloud or local, since it makes every app so much more approachable and more powerful. It’s just tools all the way down.