What is an MCP client and what role does it play in your application?

The MCP client serves as the communication bridge between your application and an MCP server. It is your access point to all the tools, resources, and prompts that an MCP server provides, and it handles the message exchange and protocol details so your application code does not have to. In practice, the MCP client exposes a clean interface to your code: you ask it for the list of available tools, you ask it to execute a specific tool, and the client takes care of formatting the requests, sending them over the chosen transport, and parsing the responses. This abstraction lets you focus on your application logic instead of the protocol's wire format.