MCP crossed from “interesting RFC” into “paste this server into your agent.”

GitHub READMEs, Discord drops, and one-click installs now ship tools that can read files, hit HTTP, and sometimes run shell. That is power. It is also the same surface that ate API keys in every other plugin ecosystem.

What is actually shipping

A Model Context Protocol server exposes tools and resources to a host (Claude Code, IDE agents, custom runtimes). The host decides which servers attach. The model decides which tools to call. Your job is everything between those two sentences: allowlists, auth, and blast radius.

Community servers move fast. Pin a commit or a release tag.…