This is the primary of 5 components on this sequence.
1. ELI5: Understanding MCP
Imagine you might have a single common plug that matches all of your gadgets—that’s basically what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for AI. MCP is an open customary (suppose “USB-C for AI integrations”) that enables AI fashions to hook up with many various apps and information sources in a constant means. In easy phrases, MCP lets an AI assistant speak to varied software program instruments utilizing a typical language, as a substitute of every device requiring a distinct adapter or customized code.
So, what does this imply in follow? If you’re utilizing an AI coding assistant like Cursor or Windsurf, MCP is the shared protocol that lets that assistant use exterior instruments in your behalf. For instance, with MCP an AI mannequin may fetch info from a database, edit a design in Figma, or management a music app—all by sending natural-language directions by means of a standardized interface. You (or the AI) not have to manually swap contexts or be taught every device’s API; the MCP “translator” bridges the hole between human language and software program instructions.
In a nutshell, MCP is like giving your AI assistant a common distant management to function all of your digital gadgets and providers. Instead of being caught in its personal world, your AI can now attain out and press the buttons of different purposes safely and intelligently. This widespread protocol means one AI can combine with 1000’s of instruments so long as these instruments have an MCP interface—eliminating the necessity for customized integrations for every new app. The consequence: Your AI helper turns into much more succesful, in a position to not simply chat about issues however take actions in the actual software program you utilize.
🧩 Built an MCP that lets Claude speak on to Blender. It helps you create stunning 3D scenes utilizing simply prompts!
Here’s a demo of me making a “low-poly dragon guarding treasure” scene in just some sentences👇
Video: Siddharth Ahuja
2. Historical Context: From Text Prediction to Tool-Augmented Agents
To admire MCP, it helps to recall how AI assistants advanced. Early giant language fashions (LLMs) have been basically intelligent textual content predictors: Given some enter, they’d generate a continuation based mostly on patterns in coaching information. They have been highly effective for answering questions or writing textual content however functionally remoted—they’d no built-in means to make use of exterior instruments or real-time information. If you requested a 2020-era mannequin to examine your calendar or fetch a file, it couldn’t; it solely knew learn how to produce textual content.
2023 was a turning level. AI programs like ChatGPT started to combine “tools” and plug-ins. OpenAI launched operate calling and plug-ins, permitting fashions to execute code, use internet looking, or name APIs. Other frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and so forth.) emerged, enabling multistep “agent” behaviors. These approaches let an LLM act extra like an agent that may plan actions: e.g., search the net, run some code, then reply. However, in these early levels every integration was one-off and advert hoc. Developers needed to wire up every device individually, usually utilizing totally different strategies: One device may require the AI to output JSON; one other wanted a customized Python wrapper; one other a particular immediate format. There was no customary means for an AI to know what instruments can be found or learn how to invoke them—it was all hard-coded.
By late 2023, the group realized that to totally unlock AI brokers, we would have liked to maneuver past treating LLMs as solitary oracles. This gave rise to the thought of tool-augmented brokers—AI programs that may observe, plan, and act on the world by way of software program instruments. Developer-focused AI assistants (Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, and so forth.) started embedding these brokers into IDEs and workflows, letting the AI learn code, name compilers, run checks, and so forth., along with chatting. Each device integration was immensely highly effective however painfully fragmented: One agent may management an online browser by producing a Playwright script, whereas one other may management Git by executing shell instructions. There was no unified “language” for these interactions, which made it laborious so as to add new instruments or swap AI fashions.
This is the backdrop in opposition to which Anthropic (the creators of the Claude AI assistant) launched MCP in late 2024. They acknowledged that as LLMs grew to become extra succesful, the bottleneck was not the mannequin’s intelligence however its connectivity. Every new information supply or app required bespoke glue code, slowing down innovation. MCP emerged from the necessity to standardize the interface between AI and the huge world of software program—very similar to establishing a typical protocol (HTTP) enabled the net’s explosion. It represents the pure subsequent step in LLM evolution: from pure textual content prediction to brokers with instruments (every one customized) to brokers with a common device interface.
3. The Problem MCP Solves
Without MCP, integrating an AI assistant with exterior instruments is a bit like having a bunch of home equipment every with a distinct plug and no common outlet. Developers have been coping with fragmented integrations in every single place. For instance, your AI IDE may use one methodology to get code from GitHub, one other to fetch information from a database, and one more to automate a design device—every integration needing a customized adapter. Not solely is that this labor-intensive; it’s brittle and doesn’t scale. As Anthropic put it:
Even essentially the most subtle fashions are constrained by their isolation from information—trapped behind info silos.…Every new information supply requires its personal customized implementation, making really linked programs tough to scale.
MCP addresses this fragmentation head-on by providing one widespread protocol for all these interactions. Instead of writing separate code for every device, a developer can implement the MCP specification and immediately make their utility accessible to any AI that speaks MCP. This dramatically simplifies the combination matrix: AI platforms have to assist solely MCP (not dozens of APIs), and device builders can expose performance as soon as (by way of an MCP server) fairly than partnering with each AI vendor individually.
Another huge problem was tool-to-tool “language mismatch.” Each software program or service has its personal API, information format, and vocabulary. An AI agent attempting to make use of them needed to know all these nuances. For occasion, telling an AI to fetch a Salesforce report versus querying a SQL database versus enhancing a Photoshop file are utterly totally different procedures in a pre-MCP world. This mismatch meant the AI’s “intent” needed to be translated into each device’s distinctive dialect—usually by fragile immediate engineering or customized code. MCP solves this by imposing a structured, self-describing interface: Tools can declare their capabilities in a standardized means, and the AI can invoke these capabilities by means of natural-language intents that the MCP server parses. In impact, MCP teaches all instruments a little bit of the identical language, so the AI doesn’t want a thousand phrasebooks.
The result’s a way more strong and scalable structure. Instead of constructing N×M integrations (N instruments occasions M AI fashions), we have now one protocol to rule all of them. As Anthropic’s announcement described, MCP “replaces fragmented integrations with a single protocol,” yielding a less complicated, extra dependable means to offer AI entry to the info and actions it wants. This uniformity additionally paves the way in which for sustaining context throughout instruments—an AI can carry data from one MCP-enabled device to a different as a result of the interactions share a typical framing. In brief, MCP tackles the combination nightmare by introducing a typical connective tissue, enabling AI brokers to plug into new instruments as simply as a laptop computer accepts a USB gadget.