Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

The July 28 Model Context Protocol specification collapses MCP's stateful two-request handshake, initialize a session, then call the tool, into a single stateless HTTP call, removing the need for a server to track session IDs or route repeat calls to the same backend. Willison built three tools against the new spec inside a week to test the claim rather than take it on faith: mcp-explorer, a CLI that lists and calls tools on any MCP server through uvx with no install step; datasette-mcp, a Datasette plugin exposing three SQL tools over MCP; and an alpha llm-mcp-client plugin for his own LLM tool, demonstrated querying his blog's database and returning a correct count of 151 notes. His stated reason for leaning back into MCP over giving an agent a shell and curl: "MCP tools are easier to audit and control, and simple enough that smaller models that run on a laptop can still drive them reasonably well."

Why it matters: Shell access is powerful and hard to secure, while a fixed tool surface is auditable and controllable. Stateless MCP makes the controlled option measurably cheaper to implement correctly on both the client and server side.