MCP gets pitched as a futuristic thing. In practice, the wins I get from it day-to-day are unglamorously old. They are the same wins we wanted from IDE plugins in 2010, language servers in 2016, and devcontainers in 2020, finally delivered in a shape that actually composes.
What I actually use it for on Jobado
- Reading from production Firestore without ever copy-pasting a service account key.
- Letting the agent walk a real GitHub issue thread before proposing a refactor.
- Sandboxing 'run this against staging, not production' as a structural rule, not a vibes-based one.
- Giving the agent read-only access to the PR review queue so it can summarize what is stuck and why.
None of these are new capabilities. We could glue all of them together with bash and an afternoon. The point of MCP isn't novelty. It's that it's a standard shape, so the glue is cheap, replaceable, and most importantly, auditable.
The boring layer is the one that pays for itself in year three.