MCP

The Model Context Protocol — Anthropic’s spec for how agentic systems should expose tools to LLMs — is the single most-asked-about line item we hear from working teams. Stack Quarterly’s MCP coverage is practitioner-side: what it costs to adopt, what it costs to ignore, what the protocol gets right, and what we have had to work around.

We are deliberately not the place to read about MCP if you want a spec walkthrough; the protocol’s own documentation does that well. We are the place to read about MCP if you want to know whether your team should bet on it, what the alternative looks like, and what the tradeoff between “adopt MCP for every integration” and “use MCP for the integrations where it earns its keep” looks like in production.

Coverage on this beat is led by Reza, whose 2026 essay on a year of MCP in production is the canonical piece in the archive. Pieces on adjacent protocols (A2A, OpenAgents, custom JSON-RPC wrappers) appear under the protocols tag.