You might not need MCP

Today I have been tuning a spam filter on Blognami, and I wanted to make it easy for Claude Code to analyse spam that has slipped through the net. My initial instinct was to bolt on a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service. However, after a little bit of investigation and thinking I decided that this was a much too heavy addition at this point in time.

In the end I was able to achieve what I wanted by using a simple skill. This skill essentially drives the mysql command line tool using a read-only connection added to a '.env' file. Because the code sits in the same repository it is able to work out the shape of the data and so work out what queries to create. I am now able to pull in context from the database by running something like:

 /query-production list the tenants in probation

This skill is a lot simpler than MCP, and arguably more powerful as it has access to the full (read-only) capabilities of SQL. Adding MCP would have added a whole load of extra complexity to the system. As software engineers it is important we try to cut out complexity wherever we can. Ideally we should arrive at a more-with-less solution wherever possible.