What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and what problem does it solve?

MCP is an open protocol (introduced by Anthropic in late 2024) that standardizes how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources, and context. Think of it as a universal adapter: instead of writing bespoke integrations for every model-to-tool pairing (an M-by-N problem), a tool exposes an MCP server once and any MCP-compatible client (host app) can use it. It defines a client-server architecture where servers expose primitives, tools (callable functions), resources (readable data), and prompts (templates), over a defined transport (stdio or HTTP). It solves fragmentation: it decouples tool/integration authors from application authors, so an ecosystem of reusable connectors (GitHub, databases, filesystems, Slack) can be shared. MCP standardizes the plumbing of tool access; it does not itself make the model smarter or safer, permissions and trust of servers remain your responsibility.