[big-chungus4]

Isn't MCP just a way to give agent tools? When you are building your own agent, you can define the tools manually, but if you're using something existing like opencode, how do you add new tools as a user? You use the API for that which is currently MCP. Saying MCP is dead is kind of like saying tools are dead, which is definitely not true because all modern LLM agents are trained for tool use and you wouldn't have agents without it.

The problems listed on the article are problems with specific tools that have large tool descriptions. This has nothing to do with MCP. There is nothing in MCP that would cause the tool descriptions to use more context than they would otherwise.

[helloplanets]

You can create tools without using MCP for OpenCode: https://opencode.ai/docs/custom-tools/

[nicman23]

i mean yeah but is just a spec

[helloplanets]

What do you mean?

[big-chungus4]

MCP is a way to define tools that works with many apps and has a lot of extra functionality built in, it's not the only way, but it's popular because many apps support it. You can also make tools using the opencode API or any other API, and you can give them large descriptions that take up a lot of context. No matter how you define the tools, they are injected into the context of the model using the same chat template provided by the developers of the model.