MCP and 40 Years of Distributed Systems: When AI Agents Repeat the RPC Mistakes
In late July 2025, Julien Simon published an argument nobody in the AI tooling bubble wanted to hear: the Model Context Protocol ignores forty years of hard-won distributed systems lessons. The Hacker News thread pulled 409 points and 227 comments. Most people agreed, a few pushed back, and nearly everyone missed the detail that actually matters: MCP is not a new protocol. It is JSON-RPC 2.0, which makes it a grandchild of Sun RPC from 1984.
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