A protocol for context

Yesterday Anthropic published a protocol for plugging tools and data into a model. They call it MCP. A standard socket. No fireworks, no demo that makes a room gasp.

I read the spec twice and felt something settle.

For two years I've watched everyone solve the same problem in private. The model is brilliant and knows nothing about your world. So you bolt on retrieval, you write a custom adapter for every database, every doc store, every internal tool. Each team reinventing the same wire, slightly differently, none of them able to talk to each other. A thousand one-off connections.

A protocol says: stop. Here is the shape of the plug. Build to it once.

I've lived long enough in this industry to know which announcements matter and which ones just trend. The ones that matter are usually the dull ones. SMTP. The connector standard nobody remembers naming. The boring agreement that lets a thousand things built by strangers click together without a meeting.

Standards are where control lives. Whoever defines the socket defines what flows through it, and on whose terms. That sounds like plumbing. It is plumbing. But plumbing is what decides whether your house floods.

I keep circling a thing I can't quite name yet — about feeding a model what it needs to trust an answer, about where the verified, the owned, the grounded stuff is supposed to live. Whatever that thing turns out to be, it will need exactly this kind of unglamorous wiring underneath it. You don't build a foundation on bespoke adapters.

A protocol is an invitation to everyone who isn't in the room. It quietly took us a step closer to that.

I'll be watching what gets plugged in.