5 ms·
Underwhelming MCP vs Hype
My early thoughts on MCPs :
As I see the current state of hype, the experience is underwhelming:
Confusing targeting — developers and non devs both.
For devs — it’s straightforward coding agent basically just llm.txt , so why would I use MCP isn’t clear.
For non devs — It’s like tools that can be published by anyone and some setup to add config etc. But the same stuff has been tried by ChatGPT GPTs as well last year where anyone can publish their tools as GPTs, which in my experience didn’t work well.
There’s isn’t a good client so far and the clients UIs not being open source makes the experience limited as in our case, no client natively support video upload and playback.
Installing MCPs on local machines can have setup issues later with larger MCPs.
I feel the hype isn’t organic and fuelled by Anthropic. I was expecting MCP ( being a protocol ) to have deeper developer value for agentic workflows and communication standards then just a wrapper over docker and config files.
Let’s imagine a world with lots of MCPs — how would I choose which one to install and why, how would it rank similar servers? Are they imagining it like a ecosystem like App store where my main client doesn’t change but I am able to achieve any tasks that I do with a SaaS product.
We tried a simple task — "take the latest video on Gdrive and give me a summary" For this the steps were not easy:
Go through Gdrive MCP and setup documentation — Gdrive MCP has 11 step setup process.
VideoDB MCP has 1 step setup process.
Overall 12, 13 step to do a basic task.
- bschmidt44 2y ago[flagged]
- tra3 2y agoDisagree. Leveraging internal tools like JIRA, Confluence, PagerDuty etc has been a huge boost for productivity. "I got an alert for X, who can help me" surfaces a bunch of helpful stuff. Not groundbreaking in the sense that I could do the leg work myself, but fantastic from automation point of view. What scares me is the "YOLO mode" and similar in cursor. It's not practical to review each and every tool execution after the first couple of manual tool executions... Prompt injection is still a thing, whether intentional or accidental. Little Johnny Tables is still around. It's still early days, the complicated setup with OAuth and or API tokens will be improved imo.
- bschmidt44 2y agoDoes fetching data straight to LLM context cause new problems for you? I imagine a simple Bad Request could derail the convo since it's added to the context? Fundamental things are keeping me away
- tra3 2y agoNot especially. The flow is natural, if you will. - Me: "Do this" - LLM: "Ok, let me try do this.. nope something's off. Let me try another way". Occasionally, I do have to abandon a run but in general it seems successful.
- bschmidt44 2y ago[dead]
- tra3 2y agoNot sure I'm following. I was under the impression that MCP defines a way for LLMs to reach into the "real world". The MCP servers I've played with basically say "I'm an MCP tool, and I can fetch a Jira ticket". The LLM then has the option to call the tool. Check this out https://smithery.ai/ https://smithery.ai/
- bschmidt45 2y ago[flagged]
- bschmidt50 2y ago[dead]
- bschmidt80 2y ago[dead]
- dookie1islife 2y agoI NEEd FREE OMEHY
- dookie1islife 2y agoGET ME OUT
- nextts 2y agoMCP: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bschmidt51 2y ago[dead]
- bschmidt55 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nextts 2y agoBig company wants to control the standard, so it publishes the standard.
- bschmidt55 2y ago[dead]
- muzani 2y agoMCP is just an API/SDK. It's an interface. It can't be "hype" any more than a pipe would be. It's just a different pipe shape that fits better with how LLMs operate.
- miraculixx 2y agoMCP is essentially a request-response convention. We already have one like that, and it is very versatile and well-described: REST. MCP is just hype. Hot air.