Why MCP Was Always a Bad Idea

Recently I went to an all-day event centered around the latest and greatest in the MCP world. While all of the presenters were awesome and seemed to be passionate about the work they were doing, I’m honestly tired of MCP. It’s a horrible protocol built for a time when LLMs weren’t that smart, and we’ve outgrown it.

MCP was released in November 2024 by the Anthropic team as a protocol designed to help agents connect to external services and data sources. 1 The models of the time were still relatively primitive, at least compared to what we have right now. We didn’t even have Claude Code back then, and general-purpose agentic workflows were far less reliable.