What is MCP?

MCP is an acronym for a way to represent a service, as described by Bill Gurley in April 2025. The term is used in the context of integrating services with large language models (LLMs), with subsequent discussions highlighting scaling challenges, integration difficulties, and practical implementations.

• Apr 2025 - Bill Gurley noted that MCP is an acronym people are starting to use for representing a service.
• Mar 2026 - Karan Vaidya stated that giving 1,000 MCPs to an LLM results in hitting 1 million context windows, implying attention is not free.
• May 2026 - Walden Yan reported that to get the integration right, they often had to build their own ad hoc solutions.
• Jun 2026 - Devvret Rishi said that people were connecting cloud codes to custom MCPs, and connecting via MCP servers to those not on that platform.
• Jun 2026 - Bryant Chou stated that a CLI with skills would be the way to go, and an MCP would be good for more constrained use cases.
• Jul 2026 - Seema Amble noted that nobody wants to be put in a corner with a limited role like storing expense report SQL, piped through another tool, as that is not a growth opportunity.
• Jul 2026 - Jason Lemkin described a scenario where Claude on Opus talks to Replet on Sonnet for a big feature, and Replet brings in a sub-agent called the architect, which runs on codecs on OpenAI.