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By a seller of MCP.
The trouble with MCP is that it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction. It's not like the ends negotiate a simple protocol so that later queries are cheap. That's a huge cost increase as traffic increases.
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taberiand • yesterday at 10:53 PM
There is no reason you couldn't design the system to hand off to a simple protocol through an MCP call, it's entirely up to what works in the specific situation. There is nothing in the design that mandates a path through the LLM for every request or transaction.
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction"?
In a normal case of "production software", yeah, you would not want to add an LLM in the middle to make an API call. That's silly – just write the code to make the API call if you can do it deterministically.
If you're talking to an LLM in a chat experience, and you want that LLM to go interact with some foreign system (i.e., hit an API), you need _some way_ of teaching the LLM how to make that API call. MCP is one such way, and it's probably the easiest at this point.
Doing it through MCP does introduce some latency due to a proxy server, but it doesn't introduce an additional LLM "in the middle".
(Disclaimer: I work at Stainless. Note that we actually sell SDKs at Stainless; our MCP generator is free.)