Everyone complaining that MCP is overengineered and unreliable is right — but for the wrong reasons. MCP works well for two things: GUI client integrations and documentation servers. It's a bad idea for developers wiring up tool calling in agent code. Here's the distinction nobody is making.
You know what would make that article better? Explaining that MCP means “Model Context Protocol” and at least explaining that it is a protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs. I get it, they’re talking about Claude, so they know what they’re talking about and assume that the reader is in the know, but then some bot comes along and drops it into Hacker News, and then we have to go and look it up.
You know what would make that article better? Explaining that MCP means “Model Context Protocol” and at least explaining that it is a protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs. I get it, they’re talking about Claude, so they know what they’re talking about and assume that the reader is in the know, but then some bot comes along and drops it into Hacker News, and then we have to go and look it up.