MCP has its place. It should not be the default for many use cases, but if you need to expose specific tools in a secure way to agents that are not trusted to run shell commands then MCP is great. Developers need to think beyond their own use cases and consider architecture patterns if they're going to build, not just consume, AI systems.

In theory the agents could just natively know how to do this better, to get exactly the composability you want. In fact, you could probably just write a CLI mcp-caller and tell the agent to only call MCPs via that, and boom you're done.

Where MCP does come back into the picture even for coders is a more controlled way to break a sandbox.

What I will also say is it matters less and less. It's the usual bitter lesson. The models are just getting so much better all attempts to optimize everything are a drop in the bucket.