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MCP and APIs are extremely similar, but MCP provides a common protocol that everyone can follow, so every agent can use the same protocol regardless of whether
by poxlr 1mo ago
MCP and APIs are extremely similar, but MCP provides a common protocol that everyone can follow, so every agent can use the same protocol regardless of whether the backend uses REST, OpenAPI, or GraphQL. It will just work, and agents know how to crawl other MCPs; therefore, providing an MCP tool makes it much easier for an agent to develop a usage pattern.
- hackeryogi 1mo agoTo add to this, MCPs usually focus on capabilities. This is especially useful in multi-hop situations. As an illustration, lets say I ask the agent to “Read the issue Bob posted today from Linear (issue tracker), pull relevant logs from DataDog (log tool) and suggest a fix” In the MCP world, my agent doesn’t have to spend tokens / time understanding APIs or the protocol (as the parent comment suggests). Instead, it relies on the tool provider for the best way to “read the issue” or “pull logs”. Same thing, in the API world, would usually involve multiple API hits (and possibly using the wrong APIs or params for them), interpreting the results and hitting few more APIs again.
- alex7o 1mo agoMy biggest problem is that msps can't be chained together and that the response schema is not know models are very good at filtering with jq to get only the relevant fields