MCP Isn't Dead. You're Just Using It Wrong.

Everyone and their gran have been saying that MCP is dead. But could it be that MCP's saving grace has been with us all along - hiding in plain sight? I think so. A feature buried in Claude Code's Jan 2026 release may have marked the most powerful development in MCP since its inception - and almost nobody noticed. Dynamic Tool Registration. But what is dynamic tool registration, you ask? Dynamic tool registration extends an MCP server's abilities above those of just a glorified swagger doc - allowing the server not just to list a static set of tools, but to dynamically add and remove new tools from that list in real time as part of a stateful agent session. And what's so powerful about that? Well for one it allows us to elegantly solve the main problem most people had with MCP in the first place - context bloat. By grouping our tools into collections of related actions... a larger logical grouping we might call an ability... we can then provide a load_ability tool, which when called by