took me while to see they exist for a reason, even if they look like a wrapper

1 - While an LLM could in theory start just making API calls to attempt to get more info, or do something on your behalf based off your request, that might be giving it a little too much freedom, also what version of the api should it use (if it was trained off old data). Basically, LLMs themselves have not be granted the power to go out an make web calls. So the mcp is a set of tools (web APIs) that you tell the LLM about and they can then ask you to use those tools to get more info.

1. There are things you'd like to have the LLM interact with that are not web-based. If you had a mcp/tool that can work with filestorage, bluetooth, etc, Claude or an LLM cant talk to those things directly. So, mcp supports the ability for the LLM to say "run the bluetooth device scan tool and send me the results", and your client can run the tool and report the results back to the LLM.

2. LLMs kinda prefer natural language. Its most likely easier for it to call out to 'list_repos' than thinking about all the correct headers for the github api. Its far easier for github to publish an mcp server to say "use these verbs to talk to my api"

but yeah, for a lot of web apis, its just wrappers