[lsaferite]

Benefit: A standard and purpose driven protocol for connecting agents (MCP Host/MCP Clients) to tools, resources, and prompts (MCP Server) that also exposes LLM services to said MCP Servers.

The alternative you suggest is manually integrating each set of tools or data?

Or maybe there's some misunderstanding about MCP? MCP currently has 2 transports, stdio and HTTP+SEE. The second one is, in fact, a "network-accessible API" as you call out.

[sanderjd]

No, the alternative I suggest is "can't agents figure out how to use existing kinds of APIs if they are documented well?". I think the answer is that in the current state of the art, it's very useful to give them a nudge to help them along.

But I feel like eventually I should be able to publish an API spec or a well documented interface / protocol / whatever my programming language calls it, and an agent should be able to grok that and use it without a separate protocol.

[lsaferite]

Sure, "eventually" you'll be able to point an agent at an arbitrary API and have it figure things out. We have a ways to go before we get there, but we will get there.

[sanderjd]

Fair enough!