Every AI coding tool sends your question to an LLM and hopes for the best. The LLM doesn't know your codebase, your architecture, or your team's conventions. It generates plausible-sounding answers that may or may not be correct.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) fixes this by giving AI tools structured access to real data — not through prompt engineering, but through typed, validated tool calls.
The Problem with Prompt Engineering
When you ask Claude "how does authentication work in my codebase?", the AI has two options:
- Guess based on common patterns (wrong for your specific implementation)