End of Line: Replacing MCP with Standard Filesystem Tools

Over on YouTube I shared a video where I demonstrate a more context-efficient approach for integrating existing systems into agentic tools than MCP, one that comes with built in access control mechanisms and that LLMs are already trained to understand: userspace filesystems. Properly designed, a filesystem is a hierarchical organisation of resources that allows for enumeration and filtering of those resources, and random access to their contents. In other words, pretty much anything that you can represent as a database with a collection of CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) operations, you can represent as a filesystem. The hierarchical design might not always be the best fit for the data model, but plenty of systems already use a hierarchical representation of their data with CRUD operations: think of web services where a particular user’s photo album is accessed at https://hostname.example/users/501/photos, a particular photo in their album is at…