I think this article misses the most important point of MCP: Authentication. Granted, it wasn't in the initial spec, but it is now, and it really opens interoperability without compromising on security.

Think about how to provide your SaaS service to users of ChatGPT or Claude.ai (not only coding tools like VSCode). At one time, the user will need to allow the SaaS service to interact with their agent, and will have to authenticate in the SaaS service so that the agent can act on their behalf. This is all baked in the MCP spec (through OAuth) [1], and scripting can't beat that.

That's why the Extensions/Applications marketplaces of consumer AI assistants like ChatGPT Apps [2] are a thin layer on top of MCP.

Another domain where MCP is required is for Generative UI. We need a standard that allows third-party apps to return more sophisticated content than just text The MCP spec now encloses the MCP Apps specification [3], which is exactly that: a specification for how third-party apps can generate UI components in their response. On the other hand, scripting will only let you return text.

[1]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/bas... [2]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11487775-apps-in-chatgpt [3]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps