Apify CEO Jan Čurn: MCP Isn't the Bottleneck, Your Agent Harness Is
Jan Čurn, Founder & CEO of Apify, spoke at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026, countering the 'MCP is dead' narrative. He argued that issues like context bloat stem from naive client implementations rather than the protocol itself. Čurn outlined three industry fixes—sub-agents, progressive tool discovery, and Code Mode—and demonstrated Apify's open-source universal CLI client, mcpc.
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Jan Čurn, Founder & CEO of Apify, delivered a talk titled "MCP Doesn't Suck. Your Agent Does." at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026. Addressing recent criticism of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Čurn argued that problems such as context bloat and excessive token consumption are primarily caused by naive client implementations, not flaws in the protocol itself.
In his presentation, Čurn detailed three technical fixes adopted by the industry: using sub-agents to isolate context, implementing progressive tool discovery, and utilizing Code Mode. He explained why Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) perform better for local access while MCP is superior for remote authenticated access. Additionally, he provided a live demonstration of mcpc, Apify's open-source universal MCP CLI client, and shared early results from Connector Evals comparing raw MCP, CLIs, and mcpc.