That sounds like one could publish MCPv2 which is simply OpenAPI that sets a single flag to true in the header.
MCP is a lot of duplicate engineering effort for seemingly no gain.
MCP is a lot of duplicate engineering effort for seemingly no gain.
The apples to apples comparison would be this:
A:
- Assume that AWS exposes an LLM-oriented OpenAPI spec.
- Take a preexisting OpenAPI client with support for reflection.
- Write the plumbing to go between agent tool calls and OpenAPI calls. Schema from OpenAPI becomes schema for tool calls.
- You use a preexisting OpenAPI client library, AWS can use a preexisting OpenAPI server library.
B:
- Assume that AWS exposes an MCP server.
- Program an MCP client.
- Write the plumbing to go between agent tool calls and MCP calls. Schema from MCP becomes schema for tool calls.
- You had to program an MCP client, AWS had to program an MCP server. Where as OpenAPI existed before the concept of agent tool calls, MCP did not.
That's why I said MCP is a lot of duplicate engineering effort for seemingly no gain. Preexisting API mechanisms can be used to provide LLM-oriented APIs, that's orthogonal to MCP-as-a-protocol. MCP is quite ugly as a protocol, and has very little reason to exist.
All of this is http based and could be implemented on a bespoke API but the challenge is cross-API standardization so that agents can be trained on representative data. The value of MCP is that it creates a common behavioral contract, not just a transport or schema.