APIS DON'T MAKE GOOD MCP TOOLS

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

MCP has become the de facto standard for giving large language models access to tools that someone else wrote. However, writing tools for a new MCP server is hard, so people often propose auto-converting existing APIs into MCP tools. This doesn't work well because agents don't do well with large numbers of tools, APIs can blow through context windows quickly, and APIs don't make the most of agents' unique capabilities. Agents can just call APIs if they need to do that. They do best when given tools that are designed for their unique capabilities and limitations.