4 ms·

I couldn't care less about Anthropic or MCP—as I noted, I'm a critic of MCP—but pedants bug me quite a bit especially when they're wrong. > The API is fed into

I couldn't care less about Anthropic or MCP—as I noted, I'm a critic of MCP—but pedants bug me quite a bit especially when they're wrong. > The API is fed into the LLM as context, the response is part of the output. So you implement tool use by feeding an API into the LLM as context in order to get it to produce call parameters. Got it. > Whether you pass that output through another layer of LLM is trivial. And even if you do, the "context" in that case would be only the response So the output of the tool when called with those parameters can be fed back into the LLM as further context. Got it. Given the above, it seems that we agree that tool use is implemented entirely by giving selected bits of context to the model. With that in mind, if one were to design a protocol that makes tool use plug-and-play instead of something that has to be coded by hand for each tool—a protocol designed to allow a model to discover tool APIs that it might want to bring into context and then use those APIs to bring their outputs into context—it would be reasonable to call said protocol the Model Context Protocol, because it's all about getting specific bits of Context into a Model. I'm not sure why the word "context" is the hill you decided to die on here when there is so much else to pick on with MCP, but it's time to get off the hill.

TZubiri 1y ago
That something can be context if you feed it as input to the LLM and that output will be input, is true for everything in an LLM. So you are not really conveying any meaning with that definition of MCP. MCP is an API layer between LLMs and SaaS applications, designed to provide vendor neutrality for the LLMs. Nothing to do with the context window, which is a specific variable measured in kTokens It pays to be precise when speaking and studying, and it pays to develop a precise language on nascent technologies when we comunicate about them. This reminds me when I was studying chemistry and I thought they were pedantic for the way they used the word salt. Or when I studied chess and I called every bishop and knight attack to the f6 pawn the fried liver, instead of the specific sequence of moves that we call the fried liver. Or when I thought that the arm forearm distinction was pedantic in medicine Science demands precision in communication, feel free to steal a well defined term and use it to mean something else that already has a different sign to denote it. But I'm not playing

TZubiri 1y ago

That something can be context if you feed it as input to the LLM and that output will be input, is true for everything in an LLM. So you are not really conveying any meaning with that definition of MCP. MCP is an API layer between LLMs and SaaS applications, designed to provide vendor neutrality for the LLMs. Nothing to do with the context window, which is a specific variable measured in kTokens It pays to be precise when speaking and studying, and it pays to develop a precise language on nascent technologies when we comunicate about them. This reminds me when I was studying chemistry and I thought they were pedantic for the way they used the word salt. Or when I studied chess and I called every bishop and knight attack to the f6 pawn the fried liver, instead of the specific sequence of moves that we call the fried liver. Or when I thought that the arm forearm distinction was pedantic in medicine Science demands precision in communication, feel free to steal a well defined term and use it to mean something else that already has a different sign to denote it. But I'm not playing