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The Future of MCPs
- brap 1y agoMy prediction: there will be no standard protocol, clients will do whatever works for them, and devs will do whatever it takes to be installable on those clients. Just like mobile.
- precompute 1y agoAgreed. MCP is merely the first player.
- bravetraveler 1y agoMCP in this context means "Model Context Protocol" I thought it might be "managed cloud providers", but perhaps I'm too optimistic for a change
- cantrecallmypwd 1y agoOr: Master Control Program
- freedomben 1y agoInteresting thoughts regarding MCPs being the future App Store/Platform. I don't know that I agree but I don't necessarily disagree either. Time will certainly tell. To me, MCP feels more like an implementation detail, not something that most people would ever use directly. I would expect that the future would be some app distributed through existing channels, which bundles the MCP client into it, then uses a server-side component (run by the vendor of course) to get the real work done. As much as I like the idea of people installing the servers locally, that future seems like a Linux nerd/self hosted type of activity. I just can't imagine a typical mac or windows non-power-user installing one directly. Just the idea that they would need to install "two apps" is enough to confuse them immensely. It's possible some might bundle the server too and run it locally as needed, but even in that case I think MCP is completely invisible to the user.
- grahac 1y agoAgree that for mainstream use it needs to be and will be hidden from the user entirely. Will be much more like an app store where you can see a catalog of the "LLM Apps" and click to enable the "Gmail" plugin or "Shopping.com" plugin. The MCP protocol makes this easier and lets the servers write it once to appear in multiple clients (with some caveats I'm sure).
- kitd 1y agoThey feel quite similar to Alexa skills, packaged in a standard form. The app store analogy allows them to be searched by the end user. TBH, it's quite surprising (and reassuring) that they have standardised as MCPs so soon. It normally takes a decade of walled gardens and proprietary formats before any open standards emerge.
- dist-epoch 1y agoMCP's will be run by the service providers, and you'll have the ability to "link" them, just like today you can link a Google account to give access to Calendar, GDrive, ... in the future you'll be able to give a model access to the Google MCP for your account.
- lgiordano_notte 1y agoi wonder how granular the permissions will get though. giving model-level access to something like Gmail sounds powerful, but also like a privacy minefield if not done carefully. curious to see how trust and isolation get handled.
- vendiddy 1y agoThose oauth permission dialogs come to mind but they may need to improve significantly to become useful. I don't think most of those are granular enough.
- masterj 1y agoMCP has a remote protocol. You don't need to install anything to add an MCP server, or rather, you won't once client support catches up to the spec. It will be a single click in whatever chat interface you use.
- guideamigo_com1 1y agoMCP might be one of the few technology pieces where more articles have been written about it than the actual use-cases being built. It is like the ERC20 era all over again.
- __loam 1y agoIt's very funny to see people talking about an extremely thin protocol like this.
- soulofmischief 1y agoIt's a matter of organizing developer effort around a set of standards. Good architecture makes it easy to contribute to the ecosystem, and currently agentic tooling is the wild west, with little in terms of standardization. Now we are seeing more developer momentum around making our everyday tools accessible to agents.
- klik99 1y agoYeah, it's a good thing to be talking about pie in the sky ideas, most of which won't really work. The few good ideas that survive internet critics picking apart the smallest details could be interesting
- atonse 1y agoI don't feel that way. Maybe the first examples have all been related to what software people do, but I think an MCP for a travel site would be a game changer. There are so many things I want to tell a travel site that just doesn't fit into filters, so then end up spending more time searching all kinds of permutations. These could be done with an MCP-augmented agent.
- esafak 1y agoThere is no saying that they will expose more functionality through the MCP API than their web site. I imagine the API will be more limited.
- helsinki 1y agoAre there any open-source MCP 'app stores' currently available? I am considering building one for my employer. A place to host internally built MCPs. It would be useful to know if there is something already out there.
- sirius87 1y agoThis is a registry I know of: https://smithery.ai https://smithery.ai but it's just a listing But any self-hosted npm registry backend (e.g. github npm registry) should serve as a private MCP Server registry?
- fullstackchris 1y agoseen a lot with uvx as well (apparently a package manager for python, but i try to stay as far away as possible from python)
- tuananh 1y agoI just use OCI registry to host all my MCP modules (the way I chose to extends my MCP server's capabilities) - WASM plugins. OCI registry is available every where and probably already presented in your infrastructure. You get to use all the OCI tools/security controls you already have with it. To add new tools, you just have to update the config file to include new plugins and restart. https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
- gadders 1y ago>>MCP Affiliate Shopping Engines As someone else once said, I want a Grocery Shopping Engine. "Here's my shopping list, taking into consideration delivery times and costs, please buy this for the lowest cost from any combination of supermarkets and deliver by day after tomorrow at the latest." If MCPs gave the LLMs a window into all the major supermarkets home shopping sites that looks like it's a step closer.
- troupo 1y ago> If MCPs gave the LLMs a window into all the major supermarkets home shopping sites that looks like it's a step closer. And how exactly will they do that?
- fullstackchris 1y agoNot OP but perhaps the following mcp tools: google maps api, nearest supermarkets, puppeteer their product listing pages? Though to be honest not sure why you would need so much info - if I need lettuce or tomatoes for example, I know theyre gonna be at essentially every supermarket in my area....
- gadders 1y agoIn the UK, most supermarkets offer their own home delivery services. I was hoping that an LLM would do the heavy lifting of working out who can get your shopping cheapest from various supermarkets. Probably not worth it if you're buying lettuce and tomatoes, but if you have a large family with a £100+ grocery bill per week it might be worth it?
- selcuka 1y agoThere are existing comparison services that keep track of prices and locations of grocery items. MCP is just the glue code.
- lou1306 1y agoThis requires arithmetics and constraint solving skills that are wildly out of reach to any pure-LLM platform. At the very least you would need interfacing with a real SMT or LP solver to get something that fits the bill.
- 3np 1y ago> Think of MCPs as standardized APIs—connectors between external data sources or applications and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude. This is incorrect. MCP is Model Context Protocol. You didn't "build an MCP", you implemented an MCP server. Lighttpd is not "an HTTP", it's an HTTP server. wget is also not "an HTTP", it's an HTTP client. Lighttpd and wget are different enough that it's useful to make that distinction clear when labeling them. dnsmasq is not "a DHCP", it's a DHCP server. This distinction also matters because it is certain that we will see further protocol iterations so we will indeed have multiple different MCPs that may or may not be compatible.
- helloooooooo 1y agoI’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
- esseph 1y agoHey look I found the individual willing to die on the "ATM Machine" / "NIC card" hill!
- didgeoridoo 1y ago
- nilslice 1y agowe’ve been building most of what OP has written about with https://mcp.run https://mcp.run We started doing this the day Anthropic released MCP in November last year. Our company has always been devoted to secure plug-in system technology having built Extism, a WebAssembly plugin framework. We immediately saw MCP as the plugin system for AI and knew it would be significant, but were concerned about the security implications of running MCP servers from untrusted parties and using the STDIO transport which makes user systems vulnerable in ways we weren’t ok with. So we built mcp.run which is a secure implementation of the protocol, running servers in fully isolated & portable wasm modules. They must be allow-listed to access files & network hosts, and cannot access any part of your system without your explicit permission. They also run everywhere. Each server (we call them servlets) on mcp.run is automatically available via SSE (soon HTTP streaming) as well as STDIO, but can also be embedded directly into your AI apps, no transport needed, and can run natively on mobile! We are excited about MCP and glad so many are too - but we really need more security-oriented implementations before it’s too late and someone suffers a seriously bad exploit - which could tarnish the ecosystem for everyone.
- kaycebasques 1y agoIf you're sold on MCP, what was your "wow" moment? I've read the docs and tinkered a bit but it was a decidedly "meh" experience personally. It seems very similar to ChatGPT Plugins, and that was a flop. I don't really like the fuzzy nature of the architecture, where I never know what server will be invoked. And I have to manually opt-in to each server I want to use? To be unexpectedly useful, it seems like I would have to opt-in to tens or hundreds of servers. Yet I've heard that clients start to struggle once you have more than 20 servers plugged in...? Please excuse any fundamental errors I've repeated here, if any...
- jaapbadlands 1y agoThe first use case I found relevant and useful was the Supabase MCP server, allowing Cursor's agent to query my Supabase project. It meant no longer describing my database to Cursor, it could simply go and get the information it needed, as needed.
- bluedevil2k 1y agoWriting an internal MCP server to link our API layer to Augment/VSCode so that our Frontend developers can ask in plaintalk about API details. With over 1000 endpoints, it lets the devs find the endpoint, and more importantly the GQL fields, quickly. After some dogfooding we plan to open it up to our clients as well.
- mwigdahl 1y agoMy "wow" moment was when I wrote an internal MCP server so that Claude Code could access our test databases. It was a tiny amount of code, simple to connect up, and immediately gave Claude Code a way to directly validate queries. It's been useful in numerous scenarios since then and got me thinking about additional MCP-based tools it might be nice to have.
- grahac 1y agoYep. It is currently a Meh experience as said in the OP because the UX sucks. The idea is take a step back and imagine what could it become if those are fixed. Btw, one of my favorite MCPs is a Whois MCP so I can ask Claude Desktop to brainstorm domain names and then immediately check if they are available :). It’s clunky but I am still using it :)
- kristjank 1y agoMCPs tries too hard to signal XHR for AI, but nobody wants to earnestly deal with the consequences of AI interfacing in a wider context of mis-/disinformation, hallucination and generally letting it talk to stuff in a semi-unprompted manner.
- ehtai 1y ago[dead]
- wkat4242 1y agoThe Master Control Program has no future!
- neuroelectron 1y agoMCP is perhaps the biggest attack vector I've seen people willingly adopt simply for FOMO. Nothing about implementing it is defined or tractable. Even logging its use is extremely complicated.
- baalimago 1y agoIf LLMs are so smart, why do they need a custom "MCP" format to what's commonly known as a normal API? Why can't they just call normal APIs? Extending this thought: why would there be any difference between offering data behind an API, and offering data behind a "MCP api"? At the end of the day, the underlying data will be the same (weather, stock market info, logs, whatever), it seems LLMs just needs this to be "standardized", otherwise it doesn't get it (?). Furthermore..! LLMs can already crawl web pages just fine using (true) restful technologies. So why would there be need for other, new, special APIs when it's enough to expose the same data on a normal website? I don't get it.
- lysecret 1y agoYe its also funny to me. On the one side people are saying: Look we have computer use, browser use etc. so we don't need an api! And on the other side saying, look apis are way too complicated we need our own protocol!
- johntash 1y agoI don't understand why just using something like openapi specs didn't become the "normal" thing to do. We already have APIs for pretty much everything, why do we need a new protocol that wraps around an existing api?
- manojlds 1y agoWell, LLMs are not so smart for starters.
- mindwok 1y agoThey actually can. I have found myself getting more use out of a terminal MCP and providing OpenAPI specs than bespoke MCP servers. Bespoke MCP's right now are a convenience.
- suninsight 1y agoI also did not get it, but now I get it a bit, I think. Look at it this way. You have to get some work done - maybe book a flight ticket. So you go to two sites - first you go to flight fare comparison, then you book the ticket on the airline website. And you have to do it in code. There are two ways you can do it. First Way 1. Understand the API of the flight comparison portal. 2. Understand the API for the airline website. 3. Write code which combines both these API and does the task. Second Way 1. Message a coder friend who knows the API of the flight comparison portal and ask him to write code to get the cheapest flight. 2. Message another coder friend who knows the API of the airline portal and ask him to book a flight. Both ways are possible, but which one do you think is Less Work ? Which one is 'cognitively' easier ? Which one can you do while driving a car with one hand ? It should be clear that the second way is easier. Not only is the second way easier, but if the task requires multiple providers and a lot of context, it might be the only way possible. The first way is analogous to LLM's doing API calls. The second way is analogous to LLM's doing MCP Servers. MCP servers reduce the cognitive cost to do a task to the LLM - which dramatically increases their power.
- ilaksh 1y agoAnyone else explored a plugin approach to bundle tools with the client? I started down that path long before MCP was a thing. I do plan to add MCP and A2A support at some point. But for my program it's generally not necessary. You just go to the admin and install plugins with the tools. https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot How does discovery work with MCP? Is there a way to make it fairly seamless?
- yuweiloopy2 1y ago[dead]
- relistan 1y agoMy experience so far with MCP is also that this is not ready yet. There are a few working use cases, but generally this stuff is pretty raw.
- taytus 1y agoThe future? MCP is fighting even to have a present.
- nilslice 1y agoah the classic "guy who depends on people viewing webpages doesn't like tech that obviates need to view webpages" response!