Released in December by Anthropic, it's an open standard for giving AI agents tools they can use.

So, if you have an agent platform like Claude Desktop or Goose or Cline, you can give it a tool to say update your GitHub or Google Drive or file system or whatever for you. 100's of such tools already shipped.

In the article, the dev is developing something with Cline that needs PFPs, and so Cline builds its own MCP tool to access an image generator service, and then uses that tool to fulfil the request.

Bonus is that the whole thing is demoed with Deepseek at 6% of the cost of Claude.