I found that the other day and finally got what MCP is. Kinda just a convenience layer for hooking up an API via good "old" tool use.
Unless I'm missing something major, it's just marginally more convenient than just hooking up tool calls for, say, OpenAPI. The power is probably in the hype around it more than it's on technical merits.
I had a fun one yesterday. The `mcp-atlassian` server failed trying to create multiple Jira tickets. The error response (and error logs) was just a series of newlines (one for each ticket we wanted to create). Turned out the issue was the LLM decided to mis-capitalize the project code. My best guess is it read the product name, which has the same letters but not fully uppercase, and used that instead of the Jira project code which was also provided in the context.
The ideal is that you can simply connect to whatever MCP Server endpoint you need, without needing to code your own tools.
The reality is that the space is still really young and people are figuring things out as they go.
The number of people that have no real clue what they are doing that are jumping in is shocking. Relatedly, the number of people that can't see the value in a protocol specifically designed to work with LLM Tool Calling is equally shocking. Can you write code that glues an OpenAPI Server to an LLM-based Tool Calling Agent? 100%! Will that setup flood the context window of the LLM? Almost certainly. You need to write code to distill those OpenAPI responses down to some context the LLM can work with, respecting the limited space for context. Great, now you've written a wrapper on that OpenAPI server that does exactly that. And you've written, in essence, a basic MCP Server.
Now, if someone were to write an MCP Server that used an LLM (via the LLM Client 'sampling' feature) to consume an OpenAPI Server Spec and convert it into MCP Tools dynamically, THAT would be cool. Basically a dynamic self-coding MCP Server.
Unless I'm missing something major, it's just marginally more convenient than just hooking up tool calls for, say, OpenAPI. The power is probably in the hype around it more than it's on technical merits.