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Originally published here on the Smithery Notion
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The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a protocol designed by Anthropic, with a meteoric rise to the heart of the AI zeitgeist. It’s a universal protocol that allows developers to expose context and capabilities to any LLM.
Disclaimer: This article is fairly technical and assumes at least a cursory understanding of MCP.
The internet at its core is a conversation between your computer and some remote computer in a server farm. This conversation is just rendered to you in a web browser like Chrome.
The most basic primitive of the internet is a client-server interaction (source)
It’s not that simple though: the above server isn’t processing each request in isolation and generating the full response by itself! The server above is a really thin layer basically just routing your request to more specialized servers (called services) in an orchestrated pinball machine of computers to finally get you a response to your query like below:
The modern internet routes requests to more specialized services, then collates service responses into a meaningful response back to the requester. (source)
GitHub Star History for Stagehand, the browser tool for AI agents
GitHub Star History for the Browserbase MCP, the service connecting LLMs to browser tools