Too much exposure to local coding assistants seems to lead developers to assume that all agents typically operate in an environment where they have a full shell, with the ability to write arbitrary python scripts and curl commands and execute them.

Consider an agent which doesn’t have those tools though. MCPs are a great way to give them constrained access to remote resources.

It's more that I'd immediately ask why they don't. Obviously having some interpreter is going to make the model much more capable of context management and just analysis, so at the very least, it should be able to pipe MCP calls into e.g. a python interpreter with no IO other than stdin/stdout.