MCP Doesn't Suck. Your Agent Does. — Jan Čurn, Apify

This talk argues that the perceived failures of the MCP protocol are actually due to naive agent harness implementations. It proposes three key fixes: sub-agents for managing complexity, progressive tool discovery to avoid context bloat, and Code Mode for better code generation. The talk also makes a case for using MCP for remote, authenticated access and CLIs for local access, demonstrating this with mcpc, an open-source universal CLI client for MCP that supports stdio and remote servers, OAuth, persistent sessions, grep-based tool discovery, async tasks, and x402. Connector Evals show mcpc outperforming raw MCP and CLIs.