One Year Of Mcp: Looking Back, And Forward

In November 2024, Anthropic published a seemingly innocuous blog station entitled Introducing nan Model Context Protocol. In it, they promised that Model Context Protocol (MCP) would supply “a universal, unfastened modular for connecting AI systems pinch information sources, replacing fragmented integrations pinch a azygous protocol.”

Tech companies opportunity tons of lofty things, but successful its first year, it’s difficult to build a lawsuit that says Anthropic overpromised. MCP still has room to improve, but nan protocol filled a request and has recovered its assemblage fast. Let’s excavation into why, and wherever it mightiness beryllium headed successful 2026 and beyond.

A Little History

We leaned successful connected building an MCP server astatine Sentry very early, and successful nan past 30 days unsocial it’s served complete 278m requests, crossed much than 5,000 organizations. Those numbers sound awesome — but getting present was… rough.

For anyone building successful nan earliest days of MCP location were A LOT of bumps. Because of nan scale our institution operates at, we ran into a batch of them early.

Like astir technologies, MCP saw a batch of shifts early connected — crossed nan protocol itself and nan platforms that ended up supporting it. The first days of MCP were afloat of hacked-together things for illustration locally moving pinch chained-together commands, aliases CLIs to thief duct-tape together distant support. Outside of Anthropic’s products — which makes sense, fixed they built it — astir LLMs’ support for MCP was beautiful sketchy.

A twelvemonth later? It’s still not perfect, but it’s decidedly connected overmuch much coagulated ground. It’s besides intelligibly not going distant immoderate clip soon.

Cloudflare jumped successful headfirst present and became a “go-to” for platforms to build a full-featured MCP server on. They shipped framework helpers, OAuth support packages, made durable objects much approachable, each done nan Cloudflare Workers platform. Vercel followed suit, introducing mcp-handler arsenic an easy measurement to create MCP servers arsenic API routes successful Next.js, and shipped their ain authentication support and functionality on pinch it.

Over nan past 12 months, MCP has grown from a curious, analyzable spec to a beautiful overmuch mandatory characteristic of immoderate LLM customer — whether it’s nan terminal-heavy TUIs presently connected nan rise, aliases much afloat featured editors for illustration Cursor.

We deed our stock of challenges and lessons learned building astir MCP, and we’ve sewage a batch of hopes for wherever it’s going next.

Lessons Learned: Building MCP Servers astatine Scale

Do we cognize everything location is to cognize astir building nan cleanable MCP? Nope! No 1 does. This worldly is new-new. But here’s immoderate worldly we’ve picked up on nan way:

You’ll Need To Figure retired What’s Breaking, Where, and for Whom

Being truthful new, MCP broke… a lot, successful nan early days.

We needed amended ways to understand precisely wherever that was happening successful nan code, which instrumentality calls were flaking nan most, which users things were breaking for, and astir importantly: which combinations of clients/protocols were moving into these various issues.

Sentry has a batch of tooling that helps pinch akin usage cases, but location were perfectly gaps owed to nan operation of MCP being specified a different attack to software, and moving connected apical of Cloudflare workers.

Realizing we astir apt weren’t nan only ones who needed this, we folded nan functionality we built for monitoring MCP into Sentry for everyone to use.

Looking back, much standardization astatine a spec level would’ve gone a agelong measurement successful ensuring an easier way guardant for monitoring nan measurement MCP interacts pinch some clients and nan actions it takes.

A batch of this observability falls backmost connected nan LLMs today, but we’re perfectly seeing a emergence successful group wanting a clearer knowing of what’s happening nether nan hood pinch their MCP servers. MCP feels for illustration magic until it breaks and you’re digging for why.

Complexities are going to proceed to popular up arsenic different platforms attack nan problem successful somewhat different ways. For our part, we’re staying arsenic adjacent to nan exertion codification arsenic imaginable — and choosing to wrap Sentry astir nan MCP server furniture itself.

Remote First… but Also… Local? 

Running nan first procreation of MCP servers mostly progressive cloning down a repo, dropping them into circumstantial directories, and past battling pinch node way issues until you sewage a greenish relationship indicator. Layer connected challenges for illustration section dependencies, aliases creating/storing API tokens… It was a high-friction experience, not to mention being error-prone. Day-2 updates were annoying to effort and manage.

Remote servers sidestepped galore of these challenges, and successful nan early days were supported mostly by utilizing mcp-remote to link modular MCP servers arsenic remote. There were a fewer different proxy solutions, but nary of them really took off. This created a really spotty support ecosystem successful communal editors and tooling.

Reading nan room connected wherever each this was going, and really we could support fabrication debased for users arsenic good arsenic alteration them to conscionable “consume” nan service, we opted for a superior way of remotely hosting our MCP. Hosting remotely had a batch of benefits – it lets you continually adhd caller functionality without nan personification having to instal a caller package aliases clone thing down, you’re capable to centrally show nan work and optimize astir nan modular personification paths, and if you do it right, you besides get to simplify nan measurement you negociate personification entree done things for illustration OAuth.

Remote MCP servers are beautiful easy to instrumentality (especially utilizing nan Cloudflare / Vercel tooling I talked astir earlier) these days — and you summation a batch from a attraction standpoint connected moving them remotely (namely, nary worrying astir if users are updating their section code.)

It’s still a bully thought to person section options also. Keeping a section STDIO type useful gives you nan expertise to trial locally, and besides gives you immoderate elasticity astir nan fewer clients that don’t support OAuth successful distant MCP yet (there are a fewer retired there).

Over time, OpenAI embraced nan spec, and started including it successful their ain tooling. We’ve watched nan displacement from STDIO servers that were cloned from GitHub and tally locally, into remotely hosted MCP servers that bundle auth. Now we’re watching arsenic nan different customer platforms title to support and leverage each revision.

MCP Goes Wider, and Then, Narrower  

With MCP servers it’s really easy to autumn into nan trap of building a instrumentality for everything, and trying to conscionable replicate what you’re doing successful APIs wrong MCP instrumentality calls. But it turns retired having dozens of bloated token-heavy MCP instrumentality calls is simply a bully measurement to blast done token limits fast.

The problem pinch this attack is that pinch MCP, each clip you make a call, nan afloat instrumentality database is sent pinch each prompt. Every call, you’re eating distant astatine that precious discourse window. On apical of nan instrumentality calls, immoderate resources you create aliases prompts you connect are besides sent.

Context windows are getting bigger, but nan wasted abstraction from discourse bloat adds up very quickly, and it gets exponentially worse nan much analyzable calls you make aliases instrumentality calls you concatenation together.. We’re coming into a clip wherever nan MCP builders are pulling backmost connected nan devices they expose by default, either by scrapping unnecessary instrumentality calls entirely, aliases by giving users options to fto them trim which instrumentality calls are exposed to nan client.

We opted for this way successful our ain MCP, mostly truthful we could still support immoderate of nan useful functionality but besides springiness our users a prime successful really overmuch they wanted to expose. We removed respective instrumentality calls that weren’t being utilized astatine all, reduced nan disposable resources, and removed nan further prompts. We besides added an enhancement astatine nan OAuth consent surface that lets you configure which instrumentality groups you want to expose successful nan MCP, allowing a finer level of control. Give developers nan devices they need, but don’t eat their precious discourse model pinch what they don’t.

SSE Is Fading out, HTTP-Streamable Is in

In nan early MCP ecosystem, Server-Sent Events (SSE) were nan default way to watercourse data from a server to a client. SSE is elemental and worked good capable early on, truthful it made consciousness to usage it erstwhile we were first prototyping things. But it’s built connected apical of a long-lived HTTP relationship that tin be, well, finicky. Among nan challenges: SSE’s long-lived relationship required circumstantial infrastructure decisions to support, and successful nan arena of failure, location was nary cleanable measurement to resume sessions.

Eventually, OpenAI introduced HTTP Streamable, a much robust streaming format designed specifically to hole nan symptom points that group were starting to have. Pretty quickly thereafter, we made nan telephone to move distant from SSE to HTTP Streamable.

SSE had a batch of limitations — and moreover though it took respective months to get here, nan awesome clients each support HTTP Streamable now. We’re uncovering connections to beryllium overmuch much unchangeable wide aft nan move.

We’re still successful nan modulation time; galore servers are still leveraging SSE arsenic their default protocol, but I expect this is going to quickly shift. HTTP-Streamable ends up giving a acold simpler implementation acquisition overall, and a amended personification acquisition for consuming it.

MCP arsenic a Workflow

The astir successful MCP servers astatine this constituent I spot are ones that are designed to fresh correct into users’ existing workflows. As overmuch arsenic possible, these devices request to meet users wherever they are.

A awesome illustration of this is nan precocious released Chrome Dev Tools MCP server. This MCP makes it easier for developers to person MCP occurrence up a browser; to spot beyond nan code, and get a position of what a moving app really works/looks like. The Resend MCP server lets you return nan discourse of things you are building, and easy email it retired to users alongside your generated templates. If you’re an iOS developer, nan Xcode MCP server makes it easy to springiness models much visibility into your Xcode environment.

We’ve moreover started moving connected a caller MCP server that is designed to beryllium utilized pinch Spotlight, to thief pinch section debugging arsenic opposed to nan modular Sentry’s hosted model. This gives america a clear separation of functionality wherever nan modular Sentry MCP is designed for nan halfway of Sentry’s level functionality – but we tin now alteration immoderate circumstantial section debugging workflows arsenic well, and create scenarios wherever nan MCP servers tin activity together crossed instrumentality calls.

What’s Next for MCP? 

So what lies up for MCP? As personification that’s been building present for a while now, here’s what I spot coming:

• Protocol is group — HTTP Streamable is truthful in. There’s a spot of sound astir adding deeper Websocket support overall, but ultimately, HTTP Streamable is apt to beryllium nan superior way for a agelong while — pinch fallback to SSE arsenic needed.
• OAuth 2.1 will require immoderate work, but building for it now will salary disconnected successful nan agelong run — The move from OAuth 2.0 to 2.1 has immoderate crisp edges successful it, nary doubt, but nan ecosystem is quickly converting to 2.1 arsenic nan modular way forward. Put nan activity successful now and it’ll salary disconnected later. For servers that nan usage lawsuit fits, nary 1 wants to show users to propulsion manual tokens for authentication.
• MCP Tool consolidation is very overmuch nan vibe — Developers will proceed to look for ways to trim nan full instrumentality sprawl wrong their MCP environments, arsenic a system to power token utilization. Expect much customization options astir instrumentality exposure, and ways to present much move instrumentality usage (like nan earthy connection hunt successful nan Sentry MCP)
• Agent loops powered by MCP — With nan awesome providers each adding MCP support straight into their supplier SDKs, it’s a beautiful beardown awesome that these are first-class tooling for agents to consume. I expect MCP to go much and much a first-class national successful these workflows, as ways to extend nan functionality of systems intelligently. We’re seeing group expose more agentic flows pinch MCP, which is creating immoderate caller and absorbing ways to leverage it. It’s creating a balancing enactment betwixt discourse conservation and making these devices really useful

Over nan past twelvemonth we watched nan MCP displacement astir connected unsteady crushed — some arsenic nan protocol itself evolved, and arsenic group figured retired immoderate champion practices. It’s still nan earliest of days — and MCP will surely person plentifulness of much improvement points complete nan adjacent twelvemonth — but galore of these areas are starting to patient up now; if you’ve been waiting for things to beryllium a spot much unchangeable earlier diving in, now mightiness beryllium nan time.

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