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Take away the vocabulary and an MCP server is a list of tools, a description of each written to be read by a machine, and two ways of delivering a message. Plus authorization, and three ways of failing — the third of which no specification can catch, and it cost me twelve published articles.
GitHub's MCP server spends roughly 17,600 tokens on tool descriptions, with the full toolset on, before you ask anything. What that buys, when REST is still better, and the twelve of my own published articles that a "success" response hid from me for weeks.
In July 2026 MCP removed sessions and became stateless — the one constraint REST has been built on since 2000. MCP did not replace REST. This is how we got here.