Tools

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for how LLM applications discover and invoke tools, read structured resources, and exchange prompts with external systems through MCP servers and clients. The objective is interchangeable integrations: instead of every chat product implementing bespoke plugins for Git, databases, or ticketing, a tool provider ships an MCP server and any compatible client (IDE, assistant, agent runtime) can use it with consistent auth and capability negotiation. MCP complements HTTP inference APIs—it sits at the orchestration layer where the model decides which tool to call, not inside vLLM’s token loop. It is widely associated with agentic workflows (multi-step plans, code execution, retrieval).