I'm still struggling at the moment to see where they fit in to the distributed nature of working with LLMs and other data sources.

For example, depending on the model I use in LMStudio - some can use tools, but it doesn't yet seem to support MCP - on the other hand, cursor does - but then either it's servers or via stdio - the setup isn't entirely clear.

Also it seems that giving random access to a LLM, even if local, via an intermediate server is ripe for abuse unless you know what it's doing?