this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Almost everyone comes up with shorthand names or acronyms for things they type or say frequently.
But yeah, MCP is just an API where the API docs are taylored to try to help an LLM to use useful inputs, and it seems like they're making up new terms for existing things to try to obfuscate that it already exists under another name ๐
Not sure about RAG, but sounds like its just an API that accesses help docs or similar... ๐
RAG is Retrieval Augmented Generation. It is a fancy way of saying "we've tacked a search engine onto the LLM so that it can query for and use the text of actual documents when generating text, so that the output is more likely to be correct and grounded in reality."
And yeah, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, and is essentially an API format optimized for LLMs, as you've said, to defer to something else to do the work. This can be a (RAG like) search engine lookup, using a calculator, or something else entirely.
LLMs suck at doing a lot of stuff reliably (like calculations, making statements relating to recent events, ...), but they turn out to be quite a useful tool for translating between human and machine, and reasonably capable of stringing things together to get an answer.