ZD 25.25: Are You Down With MCP?
Model Context Protocol is getting ready to eat the world, are you down with it?
MCP is developing incredibly fast. The ecosystem is growing and fast opening up to non-technical users. It is going to change the way you can use AI. With a jazzy musical coda from the MCP Crooners.
The Distilled Spirit
Technology Today
🧠 Neurodivergent AI Leadership ()
Neurodivergent users are your canaries in the coal mine, often pushing systems and trying things that more typical users don’t need help with. Including them in your product teams to leverage their insights.
🌸 YC Demo Day Trip Report ()
Benn got into YC’s demo day and shares a first-hand account from the front lines of the AI arms race.
👓 Your Glasses Will Remember Everything ()
Echoing thoughts we had last week — AR glasses are becoming much, much better.
🔋 Fast Charging Batteries are Changing Wearables ()
Power is often the limiting factor in many technology stories. Learn how batteries are improving and changing what we can do with wearables.
Conflict in Iran
⚔ Why Did Israel Strike Today ()
The back story on Iran’s hatred of Israel and why Israel chose to strike at this juncture.
📊 A Long Distance War ()
The Israel-Iran conflict is a new and interesting fight fought at standoff ranges.
🔫 Lasers and The Future of Warfare ()
Lasers are getting cheap and powerful enough to see an active role on the battlefield in the coming decades. Could they prove a counterbalance to the drone swarms on the horizon?
💣 Hit Hard But Not Broken ()
The US hit Iran’s nuclear program very hard, but nuclear programs are a hard thing to break in the long term. Even with giant bunker busting bombs.
🗺 Twice Daily Iran Updates (Institute for the Study of War)
The ISW does amazing work covering conflicts. They have started publishing a twice daily Iran briefing that is the best way to keep up with the facts on the ground.
Substack 🚀🚀
🍾 Substack Riding the Trump II Wave ()
Substack is bursting into the Zeitgeist. They have become the center of the intellectual debate and they are raising a new round of funding to better support authors.
🌎 Derek Thompson Joins the Party ()
Abundance co-author Derek Thompson has left The Atlantic to write on his own substack to explore subjects like the anti-social century.
😠 Inside the Anti Social Century ()
Perhaps uncoincidentally, Derek visited the Big Think to talk about his views on the anti-social century we are living in.
AI Tricks
📷 Using a CustomGPT to Make Consistent Images ()
Making consistent art for your publication can be challenging or expensive, but you can leverage AI to make a reusable visual system that works.
👷♂️ Integrating Gen AI Into Your Strategy Workflow ()
ChatGPT projects can provide the tools to give AI the context it needs to help you develop your strategy.
🌟 Build a Stunning Website in 15 Minutes ()
How to use Bolt to build a stunning website for your project.
🤖 21 Ways Gemini Can Be Useful on Android (ComputerWorld)
In case you missed it, Gemini is now tightly integrated into Android. Here are some ways you can leverage it.
Life and Work Advice
🐴 Finish Things Like Your Stardew Valley Save ()
Management sims like Stardew Valley manage to model tasks in a way that makes them feel fun and rewarding. You can extrapolate that to real life.
🎞 Are You Stuck in Movie Logic? ()
Movie plots often hang on lack of communication. You don’t have to practice that in real life.
Market Intelligence
🥃 State of the Whiskey Market in 2025 (Alts.co)
Whiskey has been one of the more interesting alternative investments in recent memory. Alts looks at all the factors that make it a unique market.
👀 Recession Number to Watch (Peter Zeihan)
Peter Zeihan explains how most of our economic numbers are trailing indicators, except first time unemployment claims which can often indicate when a recession is starting. Keep an eye on it to stay ahead of the crowd.
Fun With History
⚔ Nitpicking Gladiator’s Opening Battle (ACOUP)
No movie-ready battle is ready for reality. Over a three part series Dr. Deveraux tells you why.
💾 The Rise of Tandy ()
Learn how Radio Shack and the Tandy computer came to be.
💻 How Compaq Beat Big Blue (Every)
Compaq computer started with a crazy dream: to build a “portable” IBM PC clone.
Food and Music
🧂 The Art of Seasoning And Marinades ()
The art and science of balancing marinades and how to use complimentary seasoning.
🍝 Italo Disco Era Music Videos ()
Music video is perhaps the highest form of art mankind has created. They were there for the height of the Italo Disco era as well. See some classics here.
👯♂️ 2 Live 25 Years Later ()
In the summer of 1990, Me So Horny hit the airwaves. The kids thought it was funny, the parents were in arms and Luke eventually won in court.
MCP Rising Fast
In just a few short months since our last update, the ecosystem around Model Context Protocol has exploded in a good way. The promises vendors made about integration are starting to come true — you can use it in quite a few more places than one could back in April. At the same time, SaaS vendors are all building remote MCP implementations wrapping their tools. We are rapidly approaching a world where your AI tools can read your files in Google Drive and use what they learned to write the project specification that lands in Notion without you ever copying, pasting or uploading a thing. The enterprise integration wave is emerging. Read on for a rundown on where things sit today and how you can use these tools now.
Ecosystem Coming of Age
The Model Context Protocol project is now on version 2025-06-18, their third release. This adds one very important feature for building tools: structured content is now supported in the protocol. Elicitation — or a way for the MCP server to ask questions of the user — has also been added, enabling direct and pointed inputs. The tech giants are all in on MCP. Google leaned in during CloudNext — adding Agent2Agent protocol on top. Microsoft has announced native support for Windows, an exciting and terrifying possibility.
In the original implementations, you were going to spend some time on the command line getting MCP to work. I am happy to report that this sort of activity is fast becoming a relic of the past. There has been a proliferation of cloud-based MCP support from every SaaS vendor you can name. We are rapidly coming into a world where you can go connect to your MCP servers with the click of a button and some permissions management.
For example, Notion has now created a Notion MCP endpoint. Rather than needing to run a local server and handling an API token, you can just connect directly to their endpoint. No need to run Node locally or wrestle with API keys. The pain factor is ramping down. Beyond that, the cloud servers mean that your MCP integrations can work from the browser or your mobile app. You can configure once and run anywhere.
MCP support seems to be coming from developer tools and moving outwards. Atlassian and Linear — both popular software product management apps — have joined the party. The design tool Figma is integrated into the stack. You can imagine Cursor agents talking to Notion for the requirements and coding specifications, while getting design input from Figma to build software to spec.
On the business and automation side of the street, both Stripe and PayPal have integration enabling you to do things like send an invoice from Claude. Automation platforms Zapier and Make both feature robust MCP servers. You can use either of the tools as an entry point into the thousands of apps they work with. It is pretty astounding to string together a few cloud tools to do things like research companies and then stick that information into the tracking database without leaving Claude.
Configuration is still a bit too involved, and the tools are a little sparse. But that is getting fixed as quickly as tool vendors can roll out remote MCP servers.
Are the Client Apps Almost Here?
Client tools are improving, but they still lag behind server support. In the development world, just about everything one might want to use supports MCP. For more mundane users, the options are a bit more limited. Claude Desktop is still the only fully featured client that brings a world class foundation model into the same space with support for the full local and remote MCP stack.
ChatGPT is growing MCP support. Today, most paid users users can use some limited MCP features. The search connections run over MCP, and you can plug in your own MCP server with very limited endpoints if you have the wherewithal to build one. If you are on the $200‑per‑month Pro tier you have MCP access. OpenAI tends to use that group to test advanced features before releasing them to the other service levels. I would expect full blown MCP support in the not horribly distant future on that platform.
Security Note
As Simon Willison notes, AI agents create a lethal trifecta of security risks. They have access to private data, they can communicate externally and they take untrusted inputs. They lack judgment and don’t have the ability to figure out which instructions to trust. MCP is a way to open this door really wide unless you are careful. Always keep inputs in mind, and make sure to keep firm control over approvals of any potentially destructive or distributive operations.
MCP is also a scenario where many inexperienced users are installing developer-grade tools without knowing much about it. There are a lot of MCP servers with confusing sounding names. Many of the servers could be passively or actively harmful. You need to vet the software you install very carefully when you are this close to the bleeding edge. Googling for “mcp for whatever app” and then running it can be dangerous. The good news is that the trend towards vendor provided endpoints makes this much less dangerous.
What to Expect Next
The next few months will be a very exciting time for this technology. The client tools — not quite there today — will get to the point of mass adoption. OpenAI getting it fully integrated into ChatGPT for more than the $200/month crowd will be huge and put hundreds of millions onto the platform. Windows will make an even bigger boom and push the addressable market into the billions. The size and scale of the market will do nothing but attract investment in the space. We are going to see a lot of MCP Apps in the coming months as this ecosystem takes shape. It is a really good time to start dabbling to be ready when the floodgates open in the coming months.
Musical Coda
The Look
Gold bugs are having a good quarter century.
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