This is a very obvious statement, but good MCP servers can be really good, and bad MCP servers can actively make things significantly worse. The problem is that most MCP servers are in the latter category.

As is often the case, every product team is told that MCP is the hot new thing and they have to create an MCP server for their customers. And I've seen that customers do indeed ask for these things, because they all have initiatives to utilize more AI. The customers don't know what they want, just that it should be AI. The product teams know they need AI, but don't see any meaningful ways to bring it into the product. But then MCP falls on their laps as a quick way to say "we're an AI product" without actually having to become an AI product.

There's some extra irony here: many of those product teams don't realize that AI is not something they can have within their product. If something like MCP is a good fit for them, even a little, then their product is actually a feature of the AI.

Agentic LLMs are, in a way, an attempt to commoditize entire service classes, across the board, all at once.

Personally, I welcome it. I keep saying that a lot of successful SaaS products would be much more useful and ergonomic for end users if, instead of webshit SPA, they were distributed as Excel sheets. To that I will now add: there's a lot more web services that I'd prefer be tool calls for LLMs.

Search engines have already been turned into features (why ask Google when o3 can ask it for me), but that's just an obvious case. E-mails, e-commerce, shopping, coding, creating digital art, planning, managing projects and organizations, analyzing data and trends - all those are in-scope too; everything I can imagine asking someone else to do for me is meant to eventually become a set of tool calls.

Or in short: I don't want AI in your product - I want AI of my choice to use your product for me, so I don't have to deal with your bullshit.