MCP isn't going anywhere. Some developers can't seem to see past their terminal or dev environment when it comes to MCP. Skills, etc do not replace MCP and MCP is far more than just documentation searching.

MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc.

For example, we built a custom MCP server for our CRM. Now our voice and chat agents that run on elevenlabs infrastructure can connect to our system with one endpoint, understand what actions it can take, and what information it needs to collect from the user to perform those actions.

I guess this could maybe be done with webhooks or an API spec with a well crafted prompt? Or if eleven labs provided an executable environment with tool calling? But at some point you're just reinventing a lot of the functionality you get for free from MCP, and all major LLMs seem to know how to use MCP already.

Yeah, I don't think I was particularly clear in that section.

I don't think MCP is going to go away, but I do think it's unlikely to ever achieve the level of excitement it had in early 2025 again.

If you're not building inside a code execution environment it's a very good option for plugging tools into LLMs, especially across different systems that support the same standard.

But code execution environments are so much more powerful and flexible!

I expect that once we come up with a robust, inexpensive way to run a little Bash environment - I'm still hoping WebAssembly gets us there - there will be much less reason to use MCP even outside of coding agent setups.