MCP lets you ship faster
I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Steve Krouse (via Simon Willison):
The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime
Normal APIs are promises to developers, because developer commit code that relies on those APIs, and then walk away. If you break the API, you break the promise, and you break that code. This means a developer gets woken up at 2am to fix the code
But MCP servers are called by LLMs which dynamically read the spec every time, which allow us to constantly change the MCP server. It doesn’t matter! We haven’t made any promises. The LLM can figure it out afresh every time
The implication is that we can have a dynamically defined endpoint for agents to talk to. I imagine that’s not as efficient as exposing a well-defined API, but maybe it doesn’t make a difference. Let the agent discover what tools you are making available when they visit your endpoint.
And then you can try out exposing new tools, and see how agents react to using them – agent-catalyzed product discovery.