The first time you wire Claude to a real tool and watch it work, it feels like the future showed up early. It reads a file, inspects a database, searches a repo, opens a ticket, and stitches an answer out of systems that used to need ten browser tabs.
Two hours later you ask it something that spans two of those tools, and it confidently tells you something that stopped being true in March.
That gap is not a model problem, and more connectors will not close it. MCP moves context. It does not create context.
What MCP actually solves
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. The official docs use the analogy of a USB-C port for AI applications, and that is the right mental model: one protocol instead of a pile of bespoke integrations with slightly different auth, schemas and failure modes.
