If AI is AI, why does it need a protocol to figure out how to interact with HTTP, FTP, etc.? MCP is a way to quickly get those integrations up and running, but purely because the underlying technology has not lived up to its hyped abilities so far. That's why people think of MCP as a band-aid fix.

Why the desire to reinvent the wheel every time? Agents can do it accurately, but you have to wait for them to figure it out every time, and waste tokens on non-differentiated work

The agents are writing the mcps, so they can figure out those http and ftp calls. MCP makes it so they dont have to every time they want to do something.

I wouldnt hire a new person to read a manual and then make a bespoke json to call an http server, every single time i want to make a call, and thats not a knock on the person's intelligence. Its just a waste of time doing the same work over and over again. I want the results of calling the API, not to spend all my time figuring out how to call the API

C

each ai need context management per conversation this is something that would be very clunky to replicate on top of http or ftp (as in requiring side channel information due session and conversation management)

Everyone looks at api and sure mcp seem redundant there but look at agent driving a browser the get dom method depends on all the action performed from when the window opened and it needs to be per agent per conversation

Can you do that as rest sure sneak a session and conversation in a parameter or cookie but then the protocol is not really just http is it it's all this clunky coupling that comes with a side of unknowns like when is a conversation finished did the client terminate or were just between messages and as you go and solve these for the hundredth time you'd start itching for standardization

You mean, why not ask the AI to "find a way to use FTP", including either using a tool, or writing its own code? Besides the security issues?

One simple reason is "determinism". If you ask the AI to "just figure it out", it will do that in different ways and you won't have a reliable experience. The protocol provides AI a way to do this without guessing or working in different ways, because the server does all the work, deterministically.

But the second reason is, all the other reasons. There is a lot in the specification, that the AI literally cannot figure out, because it would require custom integration with every application and system. MCP is also a client/server distributed system, which "calling a tool" is not, so it does stuff that is impossible to do on your existing system, without setting up a whole other system... a system like MCP. And all this applies to both the clients, and the servers.

Here's another way to think of it. The AI is a psychopath in prison. You want the psycho to pick up your laundry. Do you hand the psycho the keys to your car? Or do you hand him a phone, where he can call someone who is in charge of your car? Now the psycho doesn't need to know how to drive a car, and he can't drive it off a bridge. All he can do is talk to your driver and tell him where to go. And your driver will definitely not drive off a bridge or stab anyone. And this works for planes, trains, boats, etc, just by adding a phone in between.

Because protocols provide structure that increases correctness.

It is not a guarantee (as we see with structured output schemas), but it significantly increases compliance.

If AI is AI why does it need me to prompt it?

> If AI is AI

That "AI" got renamed to "AGI"