What if you don't need MCP at all?

Oh you're misunderstanding MCP here.

MCP was created so llm companies can have a plugin system. So instead of them being the API provider, they can become the platform that we build apps/plugins for, and they become the user interface to end consumers.

Mario has some fantastic content, and has really shaped how I think about my interface to coding tools. I use a modified version of his LLM-as-crappy-state-machine model (https://github.com/badlogic/claude-commands) for nearly all my coding work now. It seems pretty clear these days that progressive discovery is the way forward (e.g. skills), and using CLI tools rather than MCP really facilitates that. I've gone pretty far down the road of writing complex LLM tooling, and the more I do that the more the simplicity and composability is appealing. He has a coding agent designed along the same principles, which I'm planning to try out (https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...).

Yeah, I'm still confused as to why so many people in "AI engineering" seem to think that MCPs are the key to everything.

They are great if you have a UI that you want and it needs a plugin system, obviously.

But the benefits become much more marginal for a developer of enterprise AI systems with predefined tool selections. They are actually getting overused in this space, if anything, sometimes with security as a primary casualty.

You don't need MCP.

You need Claude Skills.

MCP is convenient and the context pollution issue is easily solved by running them in subagents. The real miss here was not doing that from the start.

Well, stdio security issues when not sandboxed are another huge miss, although that's a bit of a derail.