The jQuery Age of AI Agents (metorial.com)

Think of the current AI-agent ecosystem as the mid-2000s web: fragmented, brittle, and full of ad‑hoc glue. The headline: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) — announced in late 2024 and already gaining traction among major players — is being framed as “jQuery for AI agents.” MCP turns the painful N×M integration problem (M agent apps × N tools) into M+N by having tools expose MCP servers and agents act as MCP clients. Anthropic published pre-built servers for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub and Postgres, and other efforts (Agent2Agent, Agent Communication Protocol, Open Agent Schema Framework) are racing to provide alternative abstractions. Why it matters: MCP’s pragmatic abstraction lets developers ship agents that call tools, query databases, and integrate services without custom per‑integration plumbing, accelerating product development the way jQuery sped up web apps. But it’s imperfect — it doesn’t solve security, observability, or long‑running workflow semantics — and the stakes are higher: misbehaving agents can execute transactions, delete data, or trigger real‑world actions. The compressed timeline (months vs. years for the web) could yield faster convergence or messy fragmentation, so expect rapid iteration, competing standards, and an urgent need for hardened security, logging, and governance as the ecosystem matures.