Hey jijji, fair point, I assumed that the hn audience and/or the people interacting with the website would already know about MCP.

If you're not familiar, MCP is an open-source protocol created by Anthropic and later adopted by all major model providers. It defines how LLMs communicate with external applications and services.

More specifically, MCP standardizes the interaction between an MCP server, where the business logic resides, and a client, loosely speaking an LLM that consumes it. The MCP server exposes primitives like tools, resources, and prompts, which the client can use to perform various operations. The communication protocol used is JSON-RPC 2.0, and interaction between the client and server occurs either locally through stdio streams or remotely over streamable HTTP.

Here are some of the good things about it:

Easier integration into agents: From an agent development perspective, MCP simplifies integrating external capabilities. Previously, you'd have to write custom integrations, which is sometimes difficult or limited by the availability of public APIs. Now, you can directly plug in an MCP server, if provided. if you had to write a custom integration, using MCP is beneficial as well, as it separates integration logic from agent logic, making it easy to hot swap any of the two.

Standardized interface and incentives for companies: Because MCP standardizes communication, developers can create MCP servers independently from the specific LLM or agent consuming them. This compatibility with clients like ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, and mcp-use provides a strong incentive for companies to develop MCP servers for their own applications. This is great because they are the ones that know best how to do this (and can).

Widespread Adoption: A protocol's value heavily depends on its adoption, and MCP is sticking real well. Companies, developers, and major model providers are mostly on board with MCP.

I'd love to know if somebody has other positive points or negative points about mcp and can share it here. Some are across the thread already.