Using MCP daily through Claude Code for browser automation and external APIs. The protocol works — the tooling around it is what needs to mature.

Biggest pain point is reliability: connections drop, tools fail silently, no good way to know if a call actually reached the server.

But the article's "just HTTP with extra steps" framing misses the point. The value is the standardized tool interface. Before MCP, every AI integration was a bespoke wrapper. A shared vocabulary for "here's a tool, here's its schema, call it" is genuinely useful, rough edges and all.