The MCP that everyone's been hearing about lately - what does it even mean?!
Machine translation from the original post. Not reviewed by a human translator. Historical claims may no longer be current.
The MCP that everyone's been hearing about lately - what does it even mean?!
To explain it properly: try to think about how the internet started:
A shared language had to be invented, so that one computer could talk to a remote server. That was the invention of HTTP. Today it's transparent to us, we use browser software and visit sites, and forget that they are based on a globally agreed infrastructure, a protocol, for transferring communication and information that allows those sites to appear on our computer.
The same thing is happening now with AI.
Only now, the one who needs to know how to "speak" isn't you - it's the artificial intelligence.
And it's not simple, GPT doesn't know what "send an email" or "book an appointment" is, it needs someone to explain to it what can be done, in what language, in what format, and what will happen when it clicks.
And that's what MCP does (and in full, model context protocol) -
it's an agreed protocol that all the companies are slowly adopting and that is becoming the way in which we teach the AI how to talk to systems, services, buttons, menus, and everything.
And how do you do it? Well, it's not simple at all - it requires translating our API into a language a machine understands. Every service on the net that wants to be accessible to artificial intelligence needs to add such access to it (an mcp server).
We went from a situation where product people write documentation for developers, to a situation where today developers write documentation for artificial intelligence.
It feels surreal, but that's the stage we're at now. Mapping out for the AI all the services it can use and the ways it can access the various systems, to enable it to do actions for us "with one command".
So just as we needed protocols in order to browse the internet and see sites, and that's how concepts like HTTP came about that seem transparent to us today, now, as unimaginable as it is, a new protocol had to be invented that would allow artificial intelligence to reach out to digital services by itself.
Someone really has to sit down and map the technological communication (the "manual" kind, the kind developers know how to read) that we have used until today - like APIs, buttons, forms, etc. - and turn it into a language the artificial intelligence will know how to use.
It's an art of converting technical commands into machine command language, and it requires:
- Explaining what can even be done with the system
- Which actions are exposed in the API or in the UI
- How to access them (and how to do it securely!)
And phrasing in clear English what the AI is supposed to do in order to use them
For example:
If there's a button that sends an email – you need to write to the artificial intelligence:
"To send an email, use the send_email action. Specify recipient, subject and content. The format should be JSON like so and so."
It's not exactly programming, and it's not regular documentation - it's a new language that mediates between the thinking computer and the executing computer.
And that is MCP.
That's the stage we're at now, and whoever doesn't understand this in time - will be left out of the game.
