I think MCP has legs well beyond just the LLM / agent world. Just like USB went from "how I connect my mouse" to "how I charge my beard trimmer."

In fact, I imagine it's going to go full-duplex with all our systems, becoming a more standard way for systems to communicate with each other.

Under the hood, MCP is just JSON RPC, which is a fine format for communicating between systems.

MCP layers on some useful things like authentication and discovery. Both are critical to any kind of communication between systems built by different authors (e.g. various apps and services). Discovery, especially, is the fascinating part. Rather than hoping an OpenAPI spec exists and hoping it's right, MCP has this exchange of capabilities baked in.

I spent the last 9 years building integration technology, and from that perspective, the discovery-documentation-implementation problem is the core issue.

Right now, LLMs basically "solve" the integration problem because they can do the mapping between external tools/resources/formats and internal ones.

But there's nothing that strictly "requires" an LLM to be involved at all. That's just the primary reason to develop MCP. But you could just as well use this as a way for integrating systems, making some bets on interface stability (and using LLMs for cases only when your prior expectations no longer hold and you need a new mapping).

The comparison is perhaps imperfect and overused, but I feel like we're witnessing the birth of a new USB-like standard. There's something right now that it was designed to do, but it's a decent enough standard that can actually handle many things.

I wouldn't be surprised if in some period of time we see enterprise apps shift from REST to MCP for bi-directional integrations.

For the OP, I'm not sure if you're working on an MCP proxy (A) as a commercial offering, (B) as something for your team to use, closed source, or (C) as something open source for fun. But we just built and started selling an MCP proxy/gateway. It handles identities for humans & bots, tool allowlists, and policy setting for an org.

If you don't want to build something on your own because of option B above, get in touch.

Maybe you've already seen it, but your comment reminded me of this recent article about MCP as a universal protocol (not just for AI): https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/mcp-an-accidentally-universal-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44404905)

It could, except LLMs are non-deterministic, and the rest of the tech world largely isn't, and aligning those two and keeping them aligned with every tweak to a model and model change, and prompt change can be a lot of babysitting.

No doubt there's lots of smart people working on it, I just have been around application of tech in B2B for reliability and that's usually where the conversation usually starts.

A concise, no-nonsense list of every endpoint your service offers, with a simple text description and a JSON schema, is all that many developers ever wanted and needed in a lot of cases, but no one bothered producing them until we invented a machine that could automatically make use of them.