MCP is a fixed specification/protocol for AI app communication (built on top of an HTTP CRUD app). This is absolutely the right way to go for anything that wants to interoperate with an AI app.

For a long time now, SWEs seem to have bamboozled into thinkg the only way you can connect different applications together are "integrations" (tightly coupling your app into the bespoke API of another app). I'm very happy somebody finally remembered what protocols are for: reusable communications abstractions that are application-agnostic.

The point of MCP is to be a common communications language, in the same way HTTP is, FTP is, SMTP, IMAP, etc. This is absolutely necessary since you can (and will) use AI for a million different things, but AI has specific kinds of things it might want to communicate with specific considerations. If you haven't yet, read the spec: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25

Why is this the right way to go? It's not solving the problem it looks like it's solving. If your challenge is that you need to communicate with a foreign API, the obvious solution to that is a progressively discoverable CLI or API specification --- the normal tool developers use.

The reason we have MCP is because early agent designs couldn't run arbitrary CLIs. Once you can run commands, MCP becomes silly.

There is a clear problem that you'd like an "automatic" solution for, but it's not "we don't have a standard protocol that captures every possible API shape", it's "we need a good way to simulate what a CLI does for agents that can't run bash".