MCP was always a bad idea?
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
MCP is obsolete because modern LLMs can call APIs directly.
The author argues that Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP, released Nov 2024) is now obsolete because LLMs have become capable of writing scripts and calling APIs without it. The article traces MCP adoption, context bloat problems, and workarounds like generic search/execute patterns. It recommends abandoning MCP in favor of direct HTTP API and CLI use, citing improvements like Cloudflare's Code Mode and the use of `--help` for CLI discovery. The author proposes standardizing agent HTTP headers (e.g., Accept: text/markdown, Accept-Language for programming languages) rather than maintaining MCP infrastructure.
What commenters are saying
Two camps emerge: those who see MCP as an unnecessary layer and those who value it for security and curated access. A top comment notes that MCP provides minimal tool surfaces and mutability control that raw shells lack. Another commenter points out credential exposure: keys are still in env/files and accessible to the agent. Several commenters report that LLMs handle well-documented CLIs and APIs effectively, while others counter that production models still need MCP's structure. A comment criticizes the article's suggestion to repurpose Accept-Language headers as likely to break standards. Multiple commenters cite specific MCP integrations (Power BI, AWS) as working well in practice.