You're not having a conversation with an LLM. You're writing a spec for a system that will exploit every ambiguity you leave on the table. The sooner you treat it that way, the sooner your results stop being wildly inconsistent.
AI with tools can act. What makes an agent different is what happens when the action fails.
When you pipe LLM chat responses into production systems, you're using a scratch channel as a delivery mechanism. Tool calls separate reasoning from output and fix the reliability problems you didn't know you had.
The anti-MCP take is a single-user take. When your agent serves multiple users accessing their data on remote services, you need a protocol. MCP is the one.
Bold text and CAPS in prompts aren't voodoo. They work because of how attention literally functions in transformers. Understanding the mechanism makes you a better prompt engineer.