I had this question myself when I first learned about MCP and have seen many other people question this as well. As I've learned more about MCP, I've compiled a

I had this question myself when I first learned about MCP and have seen many other people question this as well. As I've learned more about MCP, I've compiled a list of reasons for MCP in place of REST APIs + OpenAPI Specs and recently wrote an article about it [1]. Here's a few of the more overlooked reasons IMO: - Small Language Models: While most current MCP servers are wrappers on APIs, MCP was designed to be more than that. Think of a SLM running on a local NPU using MCP to interface with the device itself - streaming real-time data between the hardware and the SLM. - Cost: OpenAPI specs are huge, and including them in the context window for every request would add up. [1] https://trevorloula.com/blog/what-is-mcp/#why-use-mcp-rather-than-just-giving-an-llm-an-openapi-spec-and-a-single-tool-to-make-api-requests https://trevorloula.com/blog/what-is-mcp/#why-use-mcp-rather...