There's a conversation happening in the agent developer community that I think is framed wrong. People keep asking whether MCP or Pilot Protocol or A2A is "the standard." Which one wins. Which one to build on. As if picking one means the others go away. I've been running production agent systems for about eight months now and I use all three. Not because I couldn't choose, but because they don't overlap. They solve completely different problems and they sit on completely different layers of the stack. Let me explain how I actually think about this. What MCP Actually Does Model Context Protocol is Anthropic's open standard for connecting a model to tools. When your agent needs to read a file, query a database, call a function, or use an external service, MCP is the interface that makes that possible in a structured way. The key word there is "model." MCP is designed around the interaction between a model and a tool. It defines how tools are described, how the model calls them, and how results come back.…