What is so good about MCP servers?

I’m pretty new to this so curious for the answers as well. But as far as I understand a MCP server enables you to connect different applications to your vibe-coding journey. For example: keep track of your worklog, write documentation on your wiki, generate social media posts about your coding progress etc.

It’s just a new way to vibe integrate with a bunch of server data or api without hand crafting individual integrations. 90% of the hype is due to developer fomo

It basically gives you the capabilities to easily extend the LLMs capabilities by providing it different kinds of tools, whether it be reading resources or performing certain update tasks.

Almost like an API for LLM driven actions.

Instead of looking at the code behind your web site, you can just have it browse the web and login to your site for itself. Instead of telling it about your database, just have it login and look at the structure itself.

internal website scraping.

everything that didnt have an api i could integrate with, but does have a janky website is now something i can put into a locally-run workflow.

its not a panacea since i cant deploy it anywhere beyond my colleagues dev machines, but it enables a tone of automation that was otherwise a.big commitment, both from my team, and each of those janky website owners.

it was possible to do this website scraping before, but nobody was thinking about it in a plug and play manner

MCP is basically USB-C for your LLM—one plug, infinite peripherals. Instead of cramming every PDF, DB, or API into a bloated prompt, you just declare a resource URI and the model streams exactly what it needs, when it needs it. No more 32 k-token guesswork, no more stale RAG dumps. Think of it as giving GPT hot-swappable superpowers: plug in your Stripe server for live transactions, yank it and plug in your Postgres MCP for row-level analytics—all without restarting the chat. The vibe-coding win is that the server owns the schema, so your prompt stays human-short and the answers stay real-time. I wired the Stripe MCP into my side-project yesterday and the latency dropped from 800 ms to 120 ms cold; the server code fits in a 120-line repo and MIT on GitHub if you want to fork it. Hot tip: if you’re tired of text-only demos, the same plug-in mindset works for video—drop a prompt into https://veo-3.app/ and watch a 4K clip with synced audio pop out faster than your linter finishes.

It's a pseudo-plugin system for chatbots, specifically the popular ones (Claude, chatgpt).

It is presented as a scalable way to provide tools to LLMs but that's only if you assume every use of LLMs is via the popular chatbot interfaces, which isn't the case.

Basically it's Anthropic's idea for extending their chatbot's toolset into desktop apps such as Google drive and others who may wish to make their software capabilities integrated into chatbots as tools.

Of course as with everything in tech, especially AI related, it has been cargo-culted to be the second coming of the messiah while all nuances about its suitability/applicability is ignored.

If you're trying to get back into full-stack javascript or python engineering, you get to practice writing your own authentication layers and self-managing any dependencies you use for edge cases that don't make sense when you're normally working on backend.

It's great! crazy eyes all seriousness though, it's a terrible solution for the "vibe" space in terms of how careless people are about it. There are thousands of "who-knows-who-made-this" servers for major integrations out there.

Text-to-text LLMs can only do one thing: output text.

These other capabilities that chat tools provide are actually extras built on top of the output sequence:

- reading and editing files

- searching the web

- executing commands

If your favorite chat tool (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Cursor, whatever) already has all the tools you want, then you don't need to add more via an MCP server.

I use Tidewave which is a package for my Elixir app, and it allows the LLM to get access to some internals of my app. For example, Tidewave exposes tools to inspect the database schema, internal hex documentation for packages, introspection to see what functions are available on a module, etc.

While I’m not “vibe” coding, it is nice to be able to ask human language questions and have the LLM query the database to answer questions. Or while working on a feature, I can ask it to delete all the test records I created, etc. I can do that in a repl myself, but it’s sometimes a nice shortcut.

Note, this only runs in dev, so it’s not querying my production database or anything.

Basically, they can be a way to expose additional data or tools to the LLM.

having it in your cv would net you a good raise?

MCP lets your agent actually do things, rather than just write things. Think controlling some other software via APIs.

MCP is the programmatic link between traditional programming (deterministic) and a new style of programming using LLMs (non-deterministic)

Ignoring for a moment all of the other functions that MCP can allow an agent to do (open a webpage, query a database, run another agent, execute local commands etc) and only focussing on the use of MCP to provide context, the big advantage of MCP over RAG is that a RAG system needs to be built and maintained: you need to extract your content, vectorise it, store it in a database, query it, update it etc etc. With MCP, you just point it at your database and the agent gets up-to-date info.

If you use LLM CLI tools like Claude Code you can let model just call shell commands directly instead of MCP. Or does MCP have some advantage even in the scenario?

I'm using Claude Code - with some MCP installed - so you would assume that whole MCP thing would work with an agentic product from the makers of this standard. In 9 out of 10 cases where a MCP would make sense to use - it doesn't know when to call the MCP. And yes, i've done all the claude.md crap. There is no transparency in this protocol about how AI would know when to call an MCP (besides direct prompting).

Not much.

[delayed]

My most common uses are below. They are huge time savers.

Cursor/Windsurf/whatever prompts:

> Use Supabase MCP to see if user@domain.com has the correct permissions to see the Create Project button in the UI.

> Let's create new feature XYZ. Use Postgres MCP to verify the schema of relevant tables instead of making assumptions.

NOTE: only run Supabase MCP with the --read-only, doing otherwise will lead to suffering.

I think 90% of the hype could be understood though if you look at things from a non-coder's perspective. All of this tool helps non-engineers with building AI applications, because they don't know how to code. They don't know how to write a simple function to call a REST API, store the results in an database, etc. etc. So they need this tooling.

There's also the fact that humans love to abstract things, even when the thing they're trying to abstract already does the job fairly well (see: Kubernetes, GraphQL)