MCP 101: How AI Actually Touches Your Tools

MCPs are everywhere right now. Can Eden explain them in 10 under 10 mins? Not sure, but she'll try. In her last solo episode of Season 3, Eden breaks down the Model Context Protocol — the standard Anthropic released in 2024 and handed to the Linux Foundation in 2025 — using the hat business she and Ellen actually run as the example. What happens when you try to wire an AI agent to Shopify, Notion, Formspree, and Instagram DMs by hand? You build five custom integrations, maintain them forever, rewrite them when you switch models, and drown your context window in JSON. MCP is the fix. In this episode: • The problem MCPs solved (and why "the model is a brain with no limbs")• Hosts, clients, servers — what each piece actually does• Tools, resources, and prompts• The July 2026 spec change that made MCP stateless• The critiques: context bloat, the 67,000-token tax, and real security incidents