What MCP Really Is: A Mental Model for Building AI Systems

As large language models become easier to use, it’s tempting to think the hardest part of AI development has already been solved. You can call an API, send a prompt, and get an impressive response in seconds. For experimentation, that’s often enough.

But the moment you try to connect a model to real data, real tools, or real users, the illusion breaks. Models don’t know where your files live. They don’t understand how your database works. They don’t know which actions they are allowed to perform, or which information they should never see.

Model Context Protocol, or MCP, exists because of that gap.

MCP is not about making models smarter. It is about giving them a structured way to interact with the world they do not understand by default.

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The Problem MCP Is Solving