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That article seems to miss the point by being incurious about _why_ there is hype around MCP instead of LangChain, LangGrah, SmolAgents, LlamaIndex, etc. We've

by paulgb 2y ago

That article seems to miss the point by being incurious about _why_ there is hype around MCP instead of LangChain, LangGrah, SmolAgents, LlamaIndex, etc. We've had tool call frameworks before, but we haven't had a way of making tools that our clients actually talked to. There was no way to build tools that other people could download and run locally without getting them to switch to a client that baked those tools in. It's like the difference between static linking and dynamic linking, but for tool calls.

rvz 2y ago
> That article seems to miss the point by being incurious about _why_ there is hype around MCP instead of LangChain, LangGrah, SmolAgents, LlamaIndex, etc. The VCs that were invested in AI companies (like Cursor) would of course need to hype something up like MCPs to get us to build them as little of those tools did not exist. Cursor already makes $100M+. So why not get behind and integrate this chosen standard to make even more money with more MCP servers. The last ingredient is to hype it all up on the internet to get everyone building. A win for the VCs regardless even though it was suspiciously orchestrated as soon as Cursor integrated it.
- vessenes 2y ago
  I too feel it's bad that companies take VC money and build open standards which let me build faster and target more providers. Seriously, what? I struggle to understand the mindset of someone frequenting HN who can say unironically that "getting everyone building" is a bad outcome. I'd like some more of that getting everyone building please.
- leonidasv 2y ago
  MCPs aren't specific to Cursor. Rather, they enable any IDE to become a Cursor competitor. Example: JetBrains released an MCP server plugin for their IDEs recently and it enables Claude Desktop to seamlessly use the IDE for reading and writing files and even compiling or running tests against it. And that's just one example; there are MCP servers for anything from VSCode to Emacs already. That means almost anyone can now use LLMs to generate code in their IDE of choice, just as they would do with Cursor. In fact, MCPs are posing a threat to many startups, especially the "wrapper" ones.
tcdent 2y ago
Tool calls in any of the agent frameworks are just wrappers around native functions. MCP let's you handle the processing outside of the agent context, redistribute tools independently, and provide them as either private or public hosted services. Basically, add an HTTP layer on the existing concept of tools. It is not a replacement for a framework, it is an enhancement of a well established pattern.

by paulgb 2y ago

rvz 2y ago

> That article seems to miss the point by being incurious about _why_ there is hype around MCP instead of LangChain, LangGrah, SmolAgents, LlamaIndex, etc. The VCs that were invested in AI companies (like Cursor) would of course need to hype something up like MCPs to get us to build them as little of those tools did not exist. Cursor already makes $100M+. So why not get behind and integrate this chosen standard to make even more money with more MCP servers. The last ingredient is to hype it all up on the internet to get everyone building. A win for the VCs regardless even though it was suspiciously orchestrated as soon as Cursor integrated it.

vessenes 2y ago
I too feel it's bad that companies take VC money and build open standards which let me build faster and target more providers. Seriously, what? I struggle to understand the mindset of someone frequenting HN who can say unironically that "getting everyone building" is a bad outcome. I'd like some more of that getting everyone building please.
leonidasv 2y ago
MCPs aren't specific to Cursor. Rather, they enable any IDE to become a Cursor competitor. Example: JetBrains released an MCP server plugin for their IDEs recently and it enables Claude Desktop to seamlessly use the IDE for reading and writing files and even compiling or running tests against it. And that's just one example; there are MCP servers for anything from VSCode to Emacs already. That means almost anyone can now use LLMs to generate code in their IDE of choice, just as they would do with Cursor. In fact, MCPs are posing a threat to many startups, especially the "wrapper" ones.

tcdent 2y ago

Tool calls in any of the agent frameworks are just wrappers around native functions. MCP let's you handle the processing outside of the agent context, redistribute tools independently, and provide them as either private or public hosted services. Basically, add an HTTP layer on the existing concept of tools. It is not a replacement for a framework, it is an enhancement of a well established pattern.