I posted this on bluesky and figured it would be worth posting here. If it reads strangely, that’s what writing ideas out a few hundred characters at a time can do to an idea. (bsky.app/profile/wycats…)

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Doing a ton of fun work with MCPs over the past few weeks. If you're tempted to think that it's all big hype bubble, I'd resist the urge. There's a lot of details in what's happening right this second that I suspect won't survive long-term. But the basic premise is sound af.

"MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs." (modelcontextprotocol.io)

This is a huge deal, potentially on the scale of the REST architecture (smaller than HTTP, but much bigger than OpenAPI Spec).

Hype in the Short-Term

There is a lot of hype-driven work driving the narrative right now, and it's very focused on a specific use-case: getting off-the-shelf MCPs from a registry and plugging them into an agent. This is a real use-case and one that I expect to mature into something long-term.

But it obscures the promise of "REST for the AI era". In the future, apps that want to interoperate with AI agents will expose MCP endpoints in the same way that they expose REST endpoints today. The MCP future will be dominated by apps.

No-code use-cases will be a part of that future, because people will need very general MCPs (like Markdown processors, for example) to plug into the emerging world of general-purpose agents that's coming. But app developers will have a crucial role to play.

App Developers Will Play a Crucial Role

Apps provide users with a clear, often novel way of thinking about a domain (shopping, coding, learning). The best apps will be able to communicate with AI agents in terms of those concepts.

The AI world is dominated by “sewage-in, sewage-out”, often producing mediocre results that reflect the mediocrity of the training data.

In this world, apps that take the time to help their users understand and interact with their domain in elegant ways will have a major leg up.

Customers will come to appreciate how much better AI agents can work when interacting with clear concepts with strong UI representations that help make the customer feel like a badass.

People who let LLMs drag them around by the ear will lose out to people whose LLM assistants interact with well-written apps with a strong conceptual foundation.

Our AI Future

Our AI future will not be built on the undifferentiated slop of mediocrity.

It will be

More curated

More structured

More specialized

And the Model Context Protocol is the most likely way that agents will interact with applications. I find it helps cut through the noise to go back to the opening sentence of the MCP website.

"MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs."

People aren't talking about applications much yet, but it's only a matter of time.

If you're an app developer, now's the time to be thinking about your future in the AI era and learning how to speak the protocol of this new era is a great way to start.

Watch this space. I’ll have more to say on this topic.