I've been involved with a few MCP servers. MCP seems like an API designed specifically for LLMs/AIs to interact with.
Agree that tool calling is the primary use case.
Because of context window limits, a 1:1 mapping of REST API endpoint to MCP tool endpoint is usually the wrong approach. Even though LLMs/agents are very good at figuring out the right API call to make.
So you can build on top of APIs or other business logic to present a higher level workflow.
But many of the same concerns apply to MCP servers as they did to REST APIs, which is why we're seeing an explosion of gateways and other management software for MCP servers.
I don't think it is a fad, as it is gaining traction and I don't see what replaces it for a very real use case: tool calling by agents/LLMs.
Agree that tool calling is the primary use case.
Because of context window limits, a 1:1 mapping of REST API endpoint to MCP tool endpoint is usually the wrong approach. Even though LLMs/agents are very good at figuring out the right API call to make.
So you can build on top of APIs or other business logic to present a higher level workflow.
But many of the same concerns apply to MCP servers as they did to REST APIs, which is why we're seeing an explosion of gateways and other management software for MCP servers.
I don't think it is a fad, as it is gaining traction and I don't see what replaces it for a very real use case: tool calling by agents/LLMs.