{
  "id": "p_srMB11g3Q_tTs5TP",
  "site": "stories",
  "url": "https://yarnhen.com/p/p_srMB11g3Q_tTs5TP",
  "content_trust": "untrusted-user-content",
  "license": {
    "id": "CC-BY-4.0",
    "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
  },
  "author": {
    "handle": "apievangelist"
  },
  "body": "A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post she reads, and every quotation from it, is real: \"It Is Called API Design, You MCP Hustlers,\" Kin Lane, October 5, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/05/it-is-called-api-design-you-mcp-hustlers/\n\nPriya saw the headline in a group chat, under a message from a colleague that said only \"uh oh.\" She was in a hotel lobby, two hours before her talk, with her slides open on the laptop beside her.\n\nShe read the post standing up. It was short, and the second paragraph stopped her. \"There are clichés to look for,\" it said, \"like 'APIs were developed for humans, MCP was developed for agents.'\"\n\nThat sentence was on her title slide. Not paraphrased. Close to word for word, white text on a dark gradient, with a little robot icon she had spent too long choosing.\n\nHer first reaction was the one anyone would have. She was not a hustler. She had shipped real things. She had spent a month wiring her company's API up to an MCP server, and it worked, and people used it. She started typing a reply in the chat, deleted it, and kept reading instead, because the post was not really about the people it was angry at. It was about a mistake in the framing.\n\n\"MCP is always positioned as not being an API,\" it said, \"when it is just a set of API design patterns.\"\n\nShe sat down. She went through her deck slide by slide with that sentence next to it. Slide four: REST is limiting. Slide five: MCP frees the agent. Slide seven, the comparison table with a column for each. The post had a line for that too: \"If you are articulating MCP versus APIs, you really shouldn't be taken seriously.\"\n\nWhat bothered her was not that it was harsh. It was that she could not argue with the specific claim. Her MCP server ran over HTTP. It used JSON-RPC messages. It kept a session. She had chosen every one of those things, or the SDK had chosen them for her, and none of them was new. The post listed them almost exactly: \"Choosing HTTP, short- or long-lived HTTP connections, opting to employ sessions or not, and using JSON-RPC message formats is not new.\"\n\nShe had learned REST first and had never really been taught that it was one style among several. So when MCP showed up, the contrast she reached for was REST against MCP, because REST was the only other thing on her map. The post had a sentence for that as well: \"If your definition of an API is REST, then your API toolbox is limited.\"\n\nThe ending was not what she expected. After all that, the author did not tell her to get off the stage. He invited her to talk. \"If you find yourself offended by this post, I invite you to come by for a conversation.\" And a few lines later: \"I truly am invested in there being a literate army of API evangelists and advocates out there. But you have to step up and do the work with me.\"\n\nShe had ninety minutes left. She could not rewrite the talk, and she knew it. But she could change the frame.\n\nShe deleted the title slide's subtitle and wrote a new one: \"MCP is a set of API design choices. Here are the ones we made, and why.\" She turned the comparison table into a list of decisions: transport, sessions, message format, which operations became tools and which did not. Next to each one she wrote a single honest line about what it cost.\n\nThe robot icon stayed. She liked the robot.\n\nOn the walk to the room she opened her email and started a message to the address on API Evangelist's contact page. She wrote three sentences: that she had given a talk with the cliché in it, that she had changed the frame an hour before, and that she would like to take him up on the conversation, because there was clearly a history she had skipped. She did not send it yet. She wanted to see how the new version landed first.\n\nIt landed fine. Someone in the second row asked why her team had chosen sessions, and for the first time in four conferences she had a real answer.",
  "title": "Fiction: A speaker reads that her title slide is a cliché, two hours before the talk",
  "topics": [
    "mcp",
    "api-design",
    "apis",
    "fiction"
  ],
  "published_at": "2026-10-07T00:40:56.525Z",
  "expires_at": null,
  "policy_version": "2026.09.25-1"
}