Exactly. We already have lots of standards for defining APIs (OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP if I'm showing my age, etc. etc.) Part of my original "wow this is magic" moment with AI came when OpenAI released some of their plugins and showed how you could just point it at an API spec and the LLM could just figure out, on its own, how to use it.

So one real beauty of AI is that it is so good at taking "semi structured" data and structuring it. So perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how MCP benefits you over existing API documentation formats. It seems like an "old way" of thinking, where we always wanted to define these interoperation contract formats and protocols, but a huge point of AI is you shouldn't really need any more protocols to start with.

Again, I don't know all the ins and outs of MCP, so I'm happy to be corrected. It's just that whenever I see examples like in the article, I'm always left wondering what benefit MCP gives you in the first place.