Stateless MCP makes small clients practical again

The July 28 MCP specification removes the initialization exchange from stateless tool calls. Servers no longer need to remember a session or route subsequent requests back to the machine holding it.

Simon Willison built three tools while exploring the change. mcp-explorer lists, inspects and calls tools from a command line. datasette-mcp exposes database listing, schema inspection and read-only SQL. An alpha llm-mcp-client brings MCP tools into his LLM utility.

The appeal extends beyond simpler transport. Explicit tool definitions are easier to inspect and constrain than a general shell with network access, and smaller models can use them. That has renewed his interest in MCP for sensitive applications, despite its own prompt-injection risks.