> The core philosophy of MCP is simple: it’s an API abstraction. The LLM doesn’t need to understand the how; it just needs to know the what.
Wrong. It needs to "understand" both these things. The only difference is where and how the strings explaining them are generated.
That's an important point.
Whether it's tools, MCP or skills: they are fundamentally all just prompts. Even if the LLM is trained to recognize those and produce the right shape of tokens that validate most of the time.
But I wouldn't use the word "understand" here, because that builds the wrong intuition. I think a more useful term would be "get guided by" or "get nudged by". Even "recognize" is slightly misleading, because it implies too much.