Should You Be Building on MCP in 2026?

What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Why Does It Matter? Before 2024, connecting an AI agent to external tools meant writing custom integration code for every single combination. GitHub connector for Claude, a different one for GPT-4, another for your internal LLM. Each model, each tool, and each team has its own bespoke glue layer. That is the N×M problem. N AI models multiplied by M tools equals N×M custom integrations to build, maintain, and debug. For a team running three models across t