THE NEW WEB

The MCP Hub Is the New Backend: Why Tool-First Architecture Changes Everything February 2026 We've been building web applications the same way for fifteen years. A frontend talks to a REST API (or GraphQL, if you're feeling modern). Behind that API sits business logic, data access layers, auth middleware, caching, and a thousand lines of glue code that exist solely to shuttle data between systems that don't know about each other. Then we added AI. And we bolted on another layer — tool definitions, function schemas, orchestrator loops — so the LLM could call the same business logic through a completely separate interface. Then we added agent-to-agent communication. Another protocol. Another set of endpoints. Another translation layer. Now the W3C is standardizing WebMCP — a browser-native API that lets AI agents running inside the browser discover and call tools on the page. That's a fourth consumer of the same underlying capabilities. Four consumers. Four separate integration surfaces.