MCP is quietly becoming the integration layer

The interesting thing about the Model Context Protocol is not the protocol. It is that everyone stopped writing bespoke tool integrations at roughly the same time.

Why it stuck

Before MCP, every agent had its own tool schema, its own auth story, and its own way of failing. The protocol did not solve anything novel, it just made the boring parts shared.

// A tool is a name, a schema, and a handler.
// That is genuinely most of it.

The result is a growing library of servers that any client can use, which is exactly the network effect the space needed.

What is still missing

Discovery, mostly. Finding a good MCP server is still a matter of asking someone. That is a directory problem, and directories get solved.