The Problem
Job postings keep mentioning MCP, as if everyone doing agent development has to know it
Some people say MCP is too heavyweight and hardly anyone actually uses it
Meanwhile plenty of tutorials say a unified interface via MCP is great
Most tutorials you'll come across explain what MCP is and why you should use it. After all that explanation, it's still hard to get an intuitive feel for the trade-offs. So today I'll flip the question around: when do you not need MCP? That's a better way to build intuition about it.
