What real problem does MCP solve for developers building with Claude?

Imagine you are building a chat interface where users can ask Claude about their GitHub data. To answer a question like what open pull requests are there across all my repositories, Claude needs tools to access GitHub's API. But GitHub has massive functionality: repositories, pull requests, issues, projects, and a lot more. Without MCP, you would have to create an enormous number of tool schemas and functions yourself, then write, test, and maintain all that integration code on your own. That ongoing burden is exactly what MCP is designed to eliminate. Instead of you authoring everything, an MCP server for GitHub handles it.