Design and Current State Constraints of MCP

MCP is becoming a popular protocol for integrating ML models into software systems, but several limitations still remain:

Stateful design complicates horizontal scaling and breaks compatibility with stateless or serverless architectures No dynamic tool discovery or indexing mechanism to mitigate prompt bloat and attention dilution Server discoverability is manual and static, making deployments error-prone and non-scalable Observability is minimal: no support for tracing, metrics, or structured telemetry Multimodal prompt injection via adversarial resources remains an under-addressed but high-impact attack vector

Whether MCP will remain the dominant agent protocol in the long term is uncertain. Simpler, stateless, and more secure designs may prove more practical for real-world deployments.

https://martynassubonis.substack.com/p/dissecting-the-model-context-protocol