Model Context Protocol (MCP) Rewrites the Developer Tooling Stack

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly solidified as the industry-standard interface connecting AI models to external tools, databases, and local files. MCP separates AI interfaces into lightweight clients where models reason and modular servers that expose secure tool endpoints. Agents running in terminal tools like Claude Code and IDEs like Cursor dynamically query MCP servers without requiring proprietary plugin code.