"MCP is getting easier to hook up - multiple servers, one client, n... - Vibeus
"MCP is getting easier to hook up - multiple servers, one client, no fuss. Genuinely good engineering.
But here's the thing I keep noticing: the words "local agent" have quietly stopped meaning what most people assume they mean. Two changes did it.
First, OAuth. The moment your client holds tokens for remote servers, your "local" agent carries credentials that decide what it can reach on someone else's machine. That's not a local privacy boundary anymore. That's a distributed one, and every server in the chain is now part of your data path.
Second, elicitation. When the agent pauses mid-task and asks you a question, that's a round trip - your answer gets shipped to whoever's on the other end of that tool call. Useful feature, honestly. But every pause is another point where data crosses the line.
I'm not complaining about either feature. They're both the right call for making agents actually useful. What bugs me is the vocabulary. "Local" used to tell me where my data lived. Now it mostly tells me where the binary sits.
So when someone tells me their setup is local, my first question isn't about the hardware anymore. It's: walk me through the path my data takes. Every server it touches, every pause where it waits on me, every token that decides what it can ask for on my behalf.
That's the boundary now. Not the box on your desk."