Voices
Simon Willison defends MCP: the critique only holds for agents that already have unrestricted shell access
Responding on Hacker News to a "MCP was always a bad idea?" post that argued MCP is obsolete now that coding agents can hit the internet directly, Willison says the piece "entirely misses the value that MCP brings today." He lists four things MCP provides that a raw terminal agent does not: control over exactly which external services it can reach, authentication that never hands the agent an API key, a UI for users to connect further services, and strong audit logging. His framing is that the critique conflates one deployment shape, the unrestricted coding agent, with every other system someone might build.
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