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> The MCP Reality Check: An Implementer's Perspective

Authors

Look, I get the vision. Model Context Protocol promises this beautiful interconnected future where AI tools just work together seamlessly. But here's what actually happens when you try to ship this:

The User Expectation Problem

End users see "MCP support" and load up 15 different servers expecting magic. They don't understand why their locally-run protocol analyzer isn't automatically fixing their NetSuite integration issues.

The Quality Desert

Most MCP servers are frankly garbage. They crash constantly, have half-baked error handling, and the LLM never bothers calling them because the tool descriptions are vague or the implementations are flaky. You end up debugging someone else's poorly-maintained code.

Premature Standardization

We've already got this "try SSE, fall back to streaming" nonsense. This is exactly why I'm allergic to standardization when things are early-stage. The spec is accumulating bloat before we even know what the core use cases really need.

The Configuration Hell

Even when an MCP server is actually good, 99% of users won't know how to configure it properly. They won't understand authentication, they won't set up the right environment variables, they won't grasp the security implications.

UI Burden Transfer

Now it's on me to build some complex UI that helps people discover, configure, manage, and debug all their MCP tools. That's not a feature, that's an entire product layer I didn't sign up for.

Half-Assed Compliance

Companies felt pressured to slap "MCP support" on their roadmap, so they shipped minimal implementations. Users expect these to work well because they're from Big Company X, but they're actually worse than the hobbyist servers.

The Pattern I Hate

This is textbook bad product development: start with an idealistic vision, create a spec around that vision, generate hype, then watch all the real-world product and business obstacles emerge. We're designing for a future that doesn't exist yet while ignoring the messy present.

What Would Actually Help

  • Fewer, better-maintained servers instead of a proliferation of low-quality ones
  • Let the implementation patterns emerge naturally before standardizing
  • Focus on 2-3 killer use cases that actually work end-to-end
  • Real error handling and observability built into the spec
  • Clear guidance on what MCP is not good for