
🛠️🧭 The Future of MCP:
Even as Agent Stacks Get More Complex.
𝗠𝘆 𝟲-𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽: 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗠𝗖𝗣 𝗶𝗻 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
The first wave of MCP was largely about connecting agents to tools.
But Anthropic's vision goes much further.
As agents move from coding into real knowledge work,
they need to connect across SaaS applications,
company systems, shared drives, interfaces,
and long-running workflows.
Here are the 6 shifts I would watch:
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: Progressive Discovery
✸ Stop loading every available tool into the context window.
✸ Let the agent discover capabilities only when needed.
✸ Load relevant tools on demand.
→ Smaller context, less tool bloat, better scalability.
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: Programmatic Tool Calling
✸ Stop using LLM inference to orchestrate every tool call.
✸ Let the model write code that composes multiple tools.
✸ Use structured outputs to make those calls easier to combine.
→ Move deterministic orchestration from repeated LLM calls into code.
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: Agent-Native MCP Servers
✸ Don't simply wrap every REST endpoint as an MCP tool.
✸ Design capabilities around what the agent actually needs.
✸ Move complex composition to the client or server when appropriate.
→ Build interfaces for agents, not REST APIs with a new wrapper.
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: Rich MCP Semantics
✸ MCP is becoming much more than tool calling.
✸ Think resources, tasks, elicitation, and MCP applications.
✸ Applications can combine an interface for humans with tools for models.
→ One server can serve both the agent and the human interacting with it.
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟱: Skills + MCP
✸ Skills capture reusable domain knowledge.
✸ MCP provides connectivity, semantics, authorization, and governance.
✸ Anthropic is working toward Skills over MCP.
→ MCP servers could provide both capabilities and the knowledge for using them.
》𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟲: The Connectivity Stack
✸ MCP will not replace every other connectivity method.
✸ CLI is powerful for local and executable environments.
✸ Computer use covers systems without structured interfaces.
✸ Skills provide reusable knowledge.
→ Production agents will increasingly combine all of them.
𝗣𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿:
The future of MCP is becoming connective tissue between
AI agents, applications, knowledge, interfaces, and enterprise systems.
The best Production AI Agents will simply know
when to use Skills, MCP, CLI, and computer use.