[rco8786]

> It's still not entirely clear (for remote servers) to me what you can do with MCP that you can't do with just a REST API,

Nothing, as far as I can tell.

> the latter being a much more straightforward integration path.

The (very) important difference is that the MCP protocol has built in method discovery. You don't have to 'teach' your LLM about what REST endpoints are available and what they do. It's built into the protocol. You write code, then the LLM automatically knows what it does and how to work with it, because you followed the MCP protocol. It's quite powerful in that regard.

But otherwise, yea it's not anything particularly special. In the same way that all of the API design formats prior to REST could do everything a REST API can do.

[toonalfrink]

In other words, MCP is RESTful (as in, it has HATEOAS) and "REST" is not