Comment by oofbey

Claude code and cursor agent and all the coding agents can and do run MCP just fine. MCP is effectively just a prompt that says “if you want to convert a binary to hex call the ‘hexdump’ tool passing in the filename” and then a promise to treat specially formatted responses differently. Any modern LLM that can reason and solve math problems will understand and use the tools you give it. Heck I’ve even seen LLMs that were never trained to reason make tool calls.

You say they’re better with the tools they’re trained on. Maybe? But if so not much. And maybe not. Because custom tools are passed as part of the prompt and prompts go a long way to override training.

LLMs reason in text. (Except for the ones that reason in latent space.) But they can work with data in any file format as long as they’re given tools to do so.