Not Everything Needs MCP, Part 2: The 2026 Phase Transition — When Three Independent Roads Led to the Same Conclusion

The Ancient Past of Eighteen Months Ago — And What It Taught Us About the Future of AI Agents Let me tell you a story from the ancient past. By which I mean eighteen months ago. In the world of AI, eighteen months is geological time. Think back to mid-2024. Context windows were small. "Prompt engineering" was the skill everyone was hiring for. MCP didn't exist yet. The idea of AI agents autonomously operating external services was mostly theoretical. I was building a medical AI product in Osaka, Japan. And I had a problem that, looking back, contained the seed of everything that happened in 2026. This is Part 2 of my "Not Everything Needs MCP" series. Part 1 told the story of Google Workspace CLI implementing a full MCP server, then deliberately deleting all 1,151 lines of it two days after launch. That investigation revealed an architectural mismatch between MCP's protocol design and large-scale APIs. But that was only one data point. Since publishing that article, I discovered two mo