alt Hacker NewsI still don't get MCP. Most likely because I didn't really check but the first feeling is creating a problem to solve a problem that doesn't exist in the first place.
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It's mostly useful to allow sandboxed AI apps to access external functionality. If an LLM has any kind of access to a CLI then it stops making sense, because LLMs are very good at CLI and almost always they use less tokens doing that. Plus, you human can easily use a cli tool, while mcp is just for agents.
MCP is most useful for extending agent loops with external tools. If you are building your own loops from scratch and don't intend to support external tools, MCP doesn't add anything.
Well for a non-coding (no CLI tooling) flow it means you don't need a sandbox and it provides a plugin architecture.
I my mind it's mostly corporate socio-political. Your management have no idea what a (rest) API is, but they saw MCP in countless LinkedIn slop and therefore you are allowed to work on one / use an upstream solution to connect the agents to your 23 year old monolithic unmaintained homebrew CRM that only runs because overcompensated Frank is still willing to pet it manually.
In enterprise MCP allows users to access resources that could either be unsafe or impractical to consume via API or CLI. It is a powerful pattern, supported by virtually all clients (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, whatever) and easily implemented in custom harnesses. If you don’t need it you don’t, but it has many useful applications. Stateless will make it a lot more practical to expand applications.