If everyone had a clear spec with high signal to noise and good documentation that explains in an agent-friendly way how to use all the endpoints while still being parsimonious with tokens and not polluting the context, then yes we wouldn't need MCP...

Instructing people how to do that amounts to a standard in any case. Might as well specify the request format and authentication while you're at it.

So you're basically saying: "nobody is using the standard that we have defined, let's solve this by introducing a new standard". Fair enough.

Yep. And those that did implement the standard did so for a different set of consumers with different needs.

I'm also willing to make an appeal to authority here (or at least competitive markets). If Anthropic was able to get Google and others on board with this thing, it probably does have merit beyond what else is available.

I don’t get your point. Obviously some spec is needed but why does it have to be MCP?

if I want my api to work with an llm id create a spec with swagger. But why do I have to go with mcp? What is it adding additionally that didn’t exist in other spec?

You can ask an AI agent that question and get a very comprehensive answer. It would describe things like the benefits of adding a wire protocol, having persistent connections with SSE, not being coupled to HTTP, dynamic discovery and lazy loading, a simplified schema, less context window consumption, etc.