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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 — one of which no specification can catch.

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 articles a "success" response quietly truncated.

MCP did not replace REST. In July 2026 it became stateless, which is the constraint REST has been built on since 2000. This is how we got here.