The promise of MCP is that it “connects your models with the world”[0].
In my experience, it’s actually quite the opposite.
By giving an LLM a set of tools, 30 in the Playwright case from the article, you’re essentially restricting what it can do.
In this sense, MCP is more of a guardrail/sandbox for an LLM, rather than a superpower (you must choose one of these Stripe commands!).
This is good for some cases, where you want your “agent”[1] to have exactly some subset of tools, similar to a line worker or specialist.
However it’s not so great when you’re using the LLM as a companion/pair programmer for some task, where you want its output to be truly unbounded.
[0]https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro
[1]For these cases you probably shouldn’t use MCP, but instead define tools explicitly within one context.
In my experience, it’s actually quite the opposite.
By giving an LLM a set of tools, 30 in the Playwright case from the article, you’re essentially restricting what it can do.
In this sense, MCP is more of a guardrail/sandbox for an LLM, rather than a superpower (you must choose one of these Stripe commands!).
This is good for some cases, where you want your “agent”[1] to have exactly some subset of tools, similar to a line worker or specialist.
However it’s not so great when you’re using the LLM as a companion/pair programmer for some task, where you want its output to be truly unbounded.
[0]https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro
[1]For these cases you probably shouldn’t use MCP, but instead define tools explicitly within one context.