Most AI tools started as isolated chat windows. You pasted in a prompt, copied the answer back out, and hoped the model had enough context. That model does not scale well. Modern AI agents need access to tools, files, APIs and structured context. That is the problem the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, tries to solve. What MCP is MCP is a protocol for connecting AI applications to external tools and data sources. Instead of every AI app inventing its own plugin system, MCP defines a shared way for tools to expose capabilities to models. In practice, an MCP server can provide things like: database queries file access issue tracker data browser automation internal documentation search custom business tools The AI client can then discover and call those tools through a common interface. Why this matters The interesting part is not "the model can call an API". That has been possible for a while. The interesting part is standardization.…