Folks still wonder “why MCP?”. Here is a step-by-step comparison

Not much feels different. And that’s exactly why it confuses people. They expect magic.

I want a list of users. Here’s my pseudo-code way of sorting it out ways of doing it.

Traditional-coder scenario

Human: “I want user data from your system.”

Human goes to the docs
Finds the right endpoint
Sets up auth
Writes code: GET /users
Parses the response and uses it

The human is doing discovery, auth, integration, and parsing.

AI without MCP

Human Prompts: “List users from System X, using this doc [url]”
AI tries to reverse engineer endpoints and payloads
Maybe works, Maybe hallucinates
Human does not get coffee, they have to watch the AI progress and steer it.

The AI is the one reading the docs, but the developer is still doing work.

MCP scenario

Human: “List all users from in a Modal”

That’s it. Human goes to get coffee.

AI checks connected MCP servers
AI asks: “Do I have a tool for this?”
Finds a structured tool like list_users exposed by that service’s MCP server

That tool defines:

  • What it does
  • What inputs it needs
  • How auth works (handled server-side)

AI calls the tool through the MCP client
MCP server executes the call safely
Structured user data comes back
AI keeps going with real data

AI: “Modal with Users is ready for your review”

Human Browsing Web

Human says, “I want to get Users for the [service]”
Human opens Chrome and goes to https://%5Bservice%5D.com
Human click “Users” on the page.
They read list of Users on the page and spams them (or whatever else humans like to do these days.)

You don’t manually open a socket and craft packets. Your browser speaks a standard protocol and every website that follows it “just works.”

MCP is trying to be that layer, but for AI using software tools instead of humans using web pages. The key part is the contract. The AI is not inventing how to call your system. It is using a capability your system formally exposed over a shared protocol.

The time has come. You must adapt to LLM/AI/Agentic based development.

2025 marks a turning point in software development. Incorporating AI or some variation of Large Language Models (LLMs) into development workflows is no longer optional—it’s a competitive necessity. This shift isn’t about following trends; it’s about pragmatic productivity and maintaining a competitive edge.

It isn’t the AI, it is you

Even if the technology stop progressing from this point in time it would still necessitate adoption. Modern AI-powered tools have evolved far beyond simple code suggestions. They now understand context, manage complex refactoring tasks, and can handle entire development workflows from your project’s code base, to its Dev Ops configs, to its integrated terminal CLI commands. You can see a screenshot below of Windsurf’s Agent deploy a Terraform instance (it created) while checking to see if its previous deploy of K8 pods were complete! Agentic IDEs, combining sophisticated code assistance with terminal access, have redefined what’s possible with software development.

I was surprised to hear a few close developer friends tell me how they aren’t comfortable with how the AI “gets in the way” of their development. That made sense a year ago, but we are far past that being a valid excuse. It is tantamount to saying I don’t like looking up issues or solutions on Github, Google, or Stack Overflow because I like to just work it out problems myself. Which is more like saying, “I like reinventing the wheel with painfully slow speed”.

At this point it is no longer a question of whether the quality of the AI workflow fits your patterns, but that you are falling behind on skills your craft requires of you to develop quality code and infrastructure efficiently.

As this panel in Windsurf’s VS Code demonstrates, not only have my files and code been improved but it suggested and executed subsequent deployment plans and ran checks to see if the steps it took were running. Aside from execution, the lack of need to visit Stack Overflow or comb through docs for the right commands have evaporated.

Your Hesitation Is Costing Time and Money

Not adopting LLMs in your development process carries significant costs:

  1. Efficiency Gap: AI-assisted teams can identify and fix issues in minutes, while others might spend hours debugging.
  2. Market Disadvantage: Companies embracing AI-assisted development ship features faster, with fewer bugs, and at lower costs.
  3. Resource Misallocation: Every hour spent on routine tasks is time not invested in innovation.

The question isn’t whether to adopt AI development tools, but how quickly you can integrate them. Every day spent working “the old way” accumulates technical debt in development velocity. The future of software development is here, and it’s AI-assisted.