[paradite]

I think this is a good explanation on the client side of MCP. But most developers are not building MCP clients (I think?). Only a few companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and Goose are building MCP client.

Most developers are currently building MCP servers that wrap a 3rd party or wrap their own service. And in this case, they are still at deciding on the tools in design-time, not runtime.

Also I want to mention that both Cursor and Claude desktop don't support dynamic toggling on / off tools within a MCP server, which means users can't really pick which tools to expose to AI. It exposes all tools within a MCP server in current implementation.

[ondrsh]

The concept of design-time vs. runtime applies to both clients and servers.

I believe you're implying that server developers can focus less on this concept (or sometimes even ignore it) when building a server. This is true.

However, the fact that end-users can now run MCP servers directly — rather than having to wait for developers to bundle them into applications — is a significant paradigm shift that directly benefits MCP server authors.

[paradite]

I see what you mean. It is a paradigm shift indeed if you look from the user's perspective.