[tloula]

I had this question myself when I first learned about MCP and have seen many other people question this as well. As I've learned more about MCP, I've compiled a list of reasons for MCP in place of REST APIs + OpenAPI Specs and recently wrote an article about it [1]. Here's a few of the more overlooked reasons IMO:

- Small Language Models: While most current MCP servers are wrappers on APIs, MCP was designed to be more than that. Think of a SLM running on a local NPU using MCP to interface with the device itself - streaming real-time data between the hardware and the SLM.

- Cost: OpenAPI specs are huge, and including them in the context window for every request would add up.

[1] https://trevorloula.com/blog/what-is-mcp/#why-use-mcp-rather...