This article entirely misses the value that MCP brings today.
Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.
If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:
1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
4. Strong audit logging for what's going on
MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.
Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.
The article misses the point of MCP but he is not wrong that it was a mistake (in some ways)
The mistake of MCP was building it in such a way that it needed to be on a separate process from the API. The statefullness of MCP was such a massive detour for the industry that we will be cleaning up after it for years.
Now that MCP is stateless we can start building what is actually useful: extending API’s for agents.
When people ask me if they should do MCP today, I say absolutely. But because the Oauth protocol side of MCP is very good and is a net positive for all public API’s
This is not a dig at MCP, the original vision of MCP was much different from how the community used it.
> The statefullness of MCP was such a massive detour for the industry that we will be cleaning up after it for years.
I remember discovering this when i wrote my first MCP server. It was like "huh? why would they do that? what use case did they have in mind?". We've spent decades making "internet shit" as stateless as possible on the backend because making it stateful is expensive and complex if you want to have any reasonable scalability. I mean good luck trying to host a stateful service on any kind of commodity serverless "scale-to-zero" infrastructure here in 2026.
Maybe it's because these AI-labs are used to statefulness. I mean LLM-based sessions are hugely stateful if you want any kind of reasonable caching to happen and caching is the only way you can economically scale out LLM's. Seen from that perspective it kind of makes sense why they'd look at MCP and think "hey, why not make this stateful on the backend as well". Statefullness just part of their DNA.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.
If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:
1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
4. Strong audit logging for what's going on
MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.
Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.
miguelspizza · · focus · HN ↗
The mistake of MCP was building it in such a way that it needed to be on a separate process from the API. The statefullness of MCP was such a massive detour for the industry that we will be cleaning up after it for years.
Now that MCP is stateless we can start building what is actually useful: extending API’s for agents.
When people ask me if they should do MCP today, I say absolutely. But because the Oauth protocol side of MCP is very good and is a net positive for all public API’s
This is not a dig at MCP, the original vision of MCP was much different from how the community used it.
cruffle_duffle · · focus · HN ↗
I remember discovering this when i wrote my first MCP server. It was like "huh? why would they do that? what use case did they have in mind?". We've spent decades making "internet shit" as stateless as possible on the backend because making it stateful is expensive and complex if you want to have any reasonable scalability. I mean good luck trying to host a stateful service on any kind of commodity serverless "scale-to-zero" infrastructure here in 2026.
Maybe it's because these AI-labs are used to statefulness. I mean LLM-based sessions are hugely stateful if you want any kind of reasonable caching to happen and caching is the only way you can economically scale out LLM's. Seen from that perspective it kind of makes sense why they'd look at MCP and think "hey, why not make this stateful on the backend as well". Statefullness just part of their DNA.