MCP (Model Context Protocol): Simply explained in 5 minutes
Put simply, MCP is a way for LLMs to more easily integrate with external tools.
By default, when you talk to Claude, ChatGPT, or your Cursor IDE, if you ask it to “pull the latest errors from Sentry and fix them” it will have no idea what you’re talking about.
Similarly, it won’t know how to do any of these:
MCP allows you to do all of these. It’s a standard protocol that engineers can follow to expose these tools to LLMs.
Below is a simplified diagram of the MCP mental model:
There are two key components
MCP Client: Various clients and apps you use, like Cursor, know how to talk using the “MCP Protocol.”
MCP Servers: Providers like Sentry, Slack, JIRA, Gmail, etc. set up adapters around their APIs that follow the MCP Protocol. Any engineer can also open source their own!
Note: The official term they’re called is MCP Servers, but the design pattern at play is the adapter pattern. They convert a message like “Get me the recent messages in the #alerts channel” to a request that can be sent to the Slack API.
So why was MCP introduced? It solves the problem of needing to manually integrate the different APIs you want to use. If you’ve ever tried talking to 3rd-party APIs, you know how much of a pain it is to integrate all the different API types and patterns. MCP solves that by forcing these providers to follow one standard interface.