MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 – Anil Dash
May 22, 2025

Over the last few months, all the nerds have gotten excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It’s a spec that was designed by Anthropic (the Claude folks) last year to let their LLM know how to ask various apps for information or be able to interact with different systems. Then, a couple months ago, OpenAI decided to support the same protocol in ChatGPT, and voila! Now it’s a standard that everybody has adopted. It’s even in Windows, the official operating system of the late 20th century.
The interesting thing about the rapid adoption of MCP isn’t the specification itself. Honestly, the spec is… kinda mid. Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled in the first place, they would be scratched out in plain text, with the occasional shouting in ALL CAPS about what we SHOULD and MUST do. MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~. But MCP works! And it’s open — and that’s what counts.
Anil Dash is bullish on MCP-not the technical details of the protocols itself so much as what it may enable.