Great question.

The MCP protocol has gotten a bad rap for wasting context due to most MCP clients dumping tool definitions directly into context, which is wasteful.

Aether doesn’t do that. It uses an opt-in "proxy" that puts MCP tool schemas on the filesystem so the agent can browse, search and load the tool schemas it needs progressively. As for motivation there's several advantages to taking a MCP 1st approach, including:

1. It allows Aether to be a truly blank slate agent as 0 tools are hardcoded into the core runtime.

2. It allows users to extend Aether using any language they want

3. MCP gives a standard way to deal with local+remote tools, progress notifications, permission prompts (e.g. ask the user to allow/deny a tool call), OAuth flows etc.

4. There's a big ecosystem of existing MCP servers users can connect to

But that's all optional, you can just as easily give Aether a single Bash tool and only use CLIs too.