World's Fair 2025
MCP Is Not Good Yet — David Cramer, Sentry
Overview
David Cramer of Sentry discusses the current state of MCP (Model Communication Protocol), framing it as a pluggable architecture for agents. He emphasizes that while the concept is powerful, current implementations are often rough and require significant design effort. Cramer suggests that MCP's true value lies in its ability to integrate services into agent workflows, particularly for B2B SaaS companies, by providing context that LLMs can reason about.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders exploring agent architectures.
- Product Managers evaluating the integration of AI capabilities into existing services.
- Developers working with tools like VS Code, Cursor, or Cloud Code that support agent plugins.
- Companies considering how to expose their services to AI agents.
- Those interested in the practical challenges and solutions for building agent-enabled features.
Key takeaways
- MCP is fundamentally a pluggable architecture for agents, not just a wrapper around existing APIs.
- Directly exposing raw API endpoints as MCP tools often leads to poor results; services must be designed with agent interaction in mind.
- For B2B SaaS companies, focusing on remote MCP servers and OAuth integration is crucial for connecting services to agents.
- The current user experience for MCP is often rough and beta-like, requiring early adopters to navigate significant challenges.
- Returning structured data like Markdown from MCP tools can be more effective for LLMs than raw JSON payloads.
- Security is paramount; organizations should only integrate trusted MCP tools and avoid downloading arbitrary packages.
- Building agents that leverage MCP requires careful consideration of context, cost, and potential token limits.
- The core value of LLMs is in agent architectures, which are essentially service architectures with new terminology.
Notable quotes
MCP is a pluggable architecture for agents. Full stop. That's it.
*MCP is not a thing that just sits on top of Open API. Like you cannot just be like I got an API. I'm going to expose all those end points as tools. You're going to get the worst results you can possibly imagine.*
*The fancy new words are just new words for the same thing. It's just a new like code of paint, right? You know MCP is just a plugin architecture.*
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