API vs MCP: When Your Agent Should Talk to the Provider Directly
Model Context Protocol won. It’s now “the boring infrastructure layer” — 78% of enterprise AI teams run MCP-backed agents in production, and it just got its biggest update ever, a fully stateless rewrite meant for “really big players” with tens of thousands of agents. So the question a solo builder faces is pointed: if the protocol is the standard, why would I ever write a raw API call myself? The instinct to just grab the API is right more often than the hype suggests. Here’s the rule. ...