13 ms·

MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0

251 points by freediver 1y ago

cranberryturkey 1y ago
[flagged]
- jansan 1y ago
  What is that? What is the difference between Model Context Protocol and Model Control Protocol, and why are both AI related?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mylons 1y ago
  ok?
- rafram 1y ago
  Why does an MCP server need my OpenAI API key? Isn't that kind of backwards? And doesn't it defeat the point of MCP, which is that one AI provider (OpenAI, whatever) can connect to many MCP servers?
  - cranberryturkey 1y ago
    its only for inference and its optional.
- madsmith 1y ago
  Model Control Protocol is not Model Context Protocol. We might be suffering from too many acronyms. (Just to be clearer, I think you’re referencing on the wrong MCP)
  - cranberryturkey 1y ago
    hmmm....what's the difference here so I can understand better? I developed this for use with roocode which supports MCP servers.
    - 85392_school 1y ago
      MCP is Model Context Protocol, a standardized API for declaring remote tools for AI to call. Roo Code supports Model Context Protocol, not your creation.
      - cranberryturkey 1y ago
        I updated the readme
  - 725686 1y ago
    That would be a TMA
  - 98codes 1y ago
    We ran out of acronyms some time in the late 2000s I think; ever since then, name collisions everywhere.
lxgr 1y ago
Turns out the “Semantic Web” was a syntactic web all along, and maybe this is the real deal?
jaredcwhite 1y ago
MCP is not an open standard. People routinely mistake "protocol specification uploaded to GitHub, PRs welcome" as open standards. They are not. Calling them "open protocols" because they are open source, not open standards (no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol!) is essentially a form of openwashing. This has been happening way too frequently lately (see also: ATProto), and it really needs to be called out.
- Toritori12 1y ago
  I guess it is a first step... a lot of current "open" protocols started as proprietary.
  - croes 1y ago
    The first step should include more security.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol! Is a standards body being involved relevant? Many standards ratified by standards bodies are "pay to access" and seem much less open than many de facto standards where no standards body was involved.
  - isodev 1y ago
    > Is a standards body being involved relevant? I believe it is. Taking the example of ATproto, it boils down to a managed platform as a service but they seem to do a #BuildInPublic thing where we can experience early developer previews. That’s not really open and it isn’t a standard.
    - philosophty 1y ago
      How are these not "open" if they're GitHub projects and entirely open source and open to outside contribution? The organizations that create "standards" are much less open than this, requiring in person lobbying, schmoozing, travel, and company affiliations.
bad_haircut72 1y ago
"The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them." I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down. It makes me wonder how much functionality of things like AI searching the web for us (sorry, doing "deep-research") might have been solved in better ways. We could have had restaurants publish their menus in a metadata format and anyone could write a python script to say find the cheapest tacos in Texas, but no, the left hand locks down data behind artificial barriers and then the right hand builds AI (datacenters and all) to get around it. On a macro level its just plain stupid.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down. I think this is right. MCP resembles robots.txt evolved into some higher lifeform, but it's still very much "describe your resources for us to exploit them". The reason the previous agent wave died (it was a Java thing in the 90s) was eventually everyone realized they couldn't trust their code once it was running on a machine it's supposed to be negotiating with. Fundamentally there is an information assymetry problem between interacting agents, entirely by design. Take that away and huge swathes of society will stop functioning.
  - arbuge 1y ago
    "describe your resources for us to exploit them" What you want to do is offer resources that make you money when they're "exploited".
    - fidotron 1y ago
      I would agree with that if there were no distinction between clients and servers. i.e. agents and LLMs are resources that should be discovered and exploited in the same exact way as anything else, and switchable in the same ways. The whole thing reminds me of stuff like Alan Kay's legendary OOPSLA talk in 1997 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY ) "Every object should have an IP" (Also "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano Dijkstras").
tagfowufe 1y ago
While I understand where the author is coming from, and I get his sentiment(s), I don't think what he proposes is actually possible: his vision relies on faux open tools and protocols and having access to walled gardens. The means of computation for these kinds of things are owned by a tiny minority. Nearly everything is a SaaS or is based, one way or the other, on rent extraction. We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice. >There is a chance, though, that younger developers, and those who weren't around to build back during that last era a generation ago, are going to get inspired by MCP to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture. It was never meant to be proprietary. Alas, the reason APIs started closing and being metered is because, after all, there's someone owning and paying for the hardware upon which you are making calls and requests. As long as there's no way to agree upon how to have a bunch of servers providing computation for anyone and at the same time ensuring their upkeep without the need for a central authority, I don't think such vision is sustainable long term. The current state of the Internet is proof of it.
- deleted 1y ago
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- auvrw 1y ago
  > We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice. Isn't that so the spirit of the times when working with LLMs? If one asks for a Prisma schema or something else out of GipPTy meant to be fed into a traditional parser, we're up the the whims of the attention blocks and layers to write out something that doesn't become a parse error. One can turn the temperature down, fine-tune, or self-host a model but does that guarantee the syntax will be correct (much less the semantics)?
hansmayer 1y ago
[flagged]
- anildash 1y ago
  My perspective on that might not be what you expect. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-weren...
  - neonbrain 1y ago
    One of the best quotes by Thomas Sowell: "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
  - tempodox 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - hansmayer 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - drowntoge 1y ago
      He even got hansmayer's original comment flagged. Truly a champion of the open web we should all be backing!
      - anildash 1y ago
        I didn't flag it.
      - hansmayer 1y ago
        Correction: the champion of Web 2.0 2.0 - * whatever that means* :)
    - anildash 1y ago
      Not sure how many national magazines you’ve written for, but it is in fact fairly standard practice to write first-person essays in the first person. You did make up a whole bunch of people you don’t like in your example there, but literally none of them nap to what I did here, so I’m not sure what your enumerating except your lack of comprehension of the situation here. Hope that helps.
CSMastermind 1y ago
I really wish we'd learn from Web 2.0. All the mistakes of "hey everything has an API now" that we learned from we're back to repeating. I feel like that meme from Watchmen with the blue guy sitting on Mars.
- deleted 1y ago
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- anildash 1y ago
  Definitely having that feeling a lot these days watching the cycles repeat. I am tired of earth. These people. Their APIs.
- olalonde 1y ago
  What mistakes are we repeating?
  - thuanao 1y ago
    Not understanding that businesses don't want open data or open protocols. Internet businesses want to monopolize information and charge rent for it. Capitalists don't want to commodify software, as that means lower profits and competition. They want to monopolize it. That's the whole game, except for companies selling physical goods over the Internet.
    - olalonde 1y ago
      So, is the idea that MCP might benefit from more built-in support for things like paid APIs to incentivize businesses?
      - thuanao 1y ago
        I think so. Though the premise of MCP betrays that AI isn't human-level intelligent. If it was there would be no need for a standard interface. It would be able to read API docs, navigate UIs to generate the proper keys, enter in billing info, and use all of that to make API requests by trial and error. That's what humans do.
munificent 1y ago
[flagged]
- anildash 1y ago
  I’m furious about it, I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that. As it turns out, when I write about the threat to democracy, HN doesn’t actually let the link survive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607135
  - munificent 1y ago
    > I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that. I get that and maybe it's just me but it really fell flat. The world is on fire and it's reasonable to take a break from writing about that sad reality but in that case, I'd rather the writing not mention it at all instead of making me think about the horrorshow but then making light of it. Your article about Procurement Capture is spot on.
    - anildash 1y ago
      I get it, we’re all sort of running into the brutality of the descent into authoritarianism at different times and in different ways all the time, we’ll be out of sync with our respective senses of whether we can process it as grief or absurdity or anger or fatigue or whatever at different times. I don’t fault anybody for feeling my tone is off if they’re not in the same mindset at the point when they’re reading.
      - broost3r 1y ago
        anil, your tone is spot on. keep it up. most of us enjoy it. source: decade-old HN lurker acct who lurked for years before that until registering
  - pvg 1y ago
    HN can't fit everyone's writing about 'the threat to democracy', beside the fact it's not really HNs remit. DOGE was still the most discussed topic on HN in the weeks after its establishment. The idea that HN didn't 'let you' is pretty spurious and (however understandably) self-absorbed.
kristianc 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
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quotemstr 1y ago
People said the same thing about "APIs" 10-15 years ago when they were a craze. Everything had to be an API! Doesn't matter whether it made sense to not. It's going to change the world! We're going to have San Francisco events with microbrews for APIs! Everyone's going to publish API frameworks! Let me make api-blog-blog.blogger.blog! Blah. Bay Area Tech regularly goes through these bursts of baseless enthusiasm for rehashes of existing technology. Is MCP useful? Yeah, probably. Is the current froth based on anything but SF-scene self-licking-ice-cream-code social cred? No.
- almog 1y ago
  Every bubble and its WSDL moment...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rglover 1y ago
  > Bay Area Tech regularly goes through these bursts of baseless enthusiasm for rehashes of existing technology. Is MCP useful? Yeah, probably. Is the current froth based on anything but SF-scene self-licking-ice-cream-code social cred? No. Thank you. You said what I was going to say. Another goose chase for something that's valuable, certainly, but being frothed up into some mythical sword in the stone. It's ultimately just a way to say "hey, here's some extra context including some functions we have defined on our server that you can ask us to call."
- adidoit 1y ago
  Exactly. Ultimately the economic incentives rather than tech frothiness will tell. One thing different from APIs is the LLM makers get tokens for every MCP call so they have incentives to hype this up significantly. MCP is useful - i use it quite a bit internally for some testing/QA workflows. However, the hype level is disproportionate to utility.
daemonk 1y ago
At a higher level, MCP seems wants to enforce a standard where no standard exists. I get that the low level technical implementation allows AI to utilize these tools. But there doesn't seem to be any standardization or method in how to describe the tool to the AI so that it can utilize it well. And I guess part of the power of AI is that you shouldn't need to standardize that? But shouldn't there at least be some way to describe the tool's functionality in natural language or give some context to the tool?
- awestroke 1y ago
  Each prompt, tool or resource fetched from an MCP server includes a name, description and a schema. What more do you want? https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/server/tools https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/ser...
quantadev 1y ago
We can now build the Semantic Web. All we have to do is create a tiny protocol (as an optional extension to MCP) for how organizations can share their SQL Table Create DDL as a static file that MCP apps can read, to understand data, and then, using the already-existing tools for AI/LLM function calling to SQL, that would become a Semantic Web. That would fill the missing link that always held back the Semantic Web which was the lack of any incentive for companies to bother to use a standard "Data Type" rather than all proprietary data types. Once we have an MCPQ (MCP with Queries), suddenly there's an incentive for organizations to collaborate at the data structure layer.
somat 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
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vivzkestrel 1y ago
Everything seems to be susceptible to enshittification and so far I see no evidence that MCP is any exception. First the value will go to users, then the users ll cut short to drive value to shareholders and then it will turn to an absolute pile of garbage as businesses make every attempt to somehow cash in on this
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  It's a protocol. The new version of the web that gets built with it may get shitty, but like HTTP or TCP, the protocol stands on its own merits and can be used freely to build cool stuff outside of that shitty ecosystem.
RansomStark 1y ago
MCP could have cracked the web opeb. The terrible standard was all about clients and local servers all on the same host. Imagine it, everything is open, servers are as simple as a pip install ... You have full control of what servers you install. What functions you turn on, what access you allow. Now everyone and their blog is sticking MCPs on their servers and locking them down behind subscriptions and paywalls. What a wasted opportunity.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  And what pays for the resources used serving your (hundreds of) requests against a “local” server? For computer control, sure, but actual remote services have actual remote costs.
cryptonector 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
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zoogeny 1y ago
> Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes I think that is one of the reasons (among many others) that the semantic web failed (which doesn't contradict the author, whose point is literally the worse-is-better mantra). People really leaned into the eXtensible part of XML and I think a certain amount of fatigue set it. XSL, XHTML, XSD, WSDL, XSLT, RDF, RSS, et al. just became a bit too much. It was architecture astronautics for data formats when what the world at the time needed was simple interchange formats (and JSON fit the bill). But I actually believe XML's time has come. I've noticed that XML appears a lot in leaked system prompts from places like Anthropic. LLMs appear to work very well with structured text formats (Markdown and XML specifically). I believe that MCP is the wrong model, though. I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves.
- MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
  Two years ago he would have written „pedantic white old Unix dudes“.
  - M4rkJW 1y ago
    True, though "dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled" made it pretty clear who he was targeting.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  > I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves. How could that possibly work for the cases that people want the intern to solve for them? If they knew the information ahead of time, presumably they'd just solve the problem by themselves I get the impression that the value folks get from MCP is "run some query for me, don't make me learn how to glue together 15 sources"
  - zoogeny 1y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your objection. You seem to imply that knowing the context is the same as knowing the solution to the problem the context provides? Let me think of an example here. Context needed to determine if there is cancer in a radiology scan would be the contents of the scan. So there are two modes here, one I say "LLM please tell me if there is cancer in this patients scan" and the LLM makes an MCP call to load the patients report. The second mode is I say "LLM, here is the patients radiology scan, can you tell me if it has signs of cancer". The first example is what I was calling a "pull" model and the second example is what I am calling a "push" model.
nimish 1y ago
Rent seeking is the name of the game for much of b2b SaaS. MCP is an attempt to make that easy, but the issue here is that a lot of the companies offering integration could be disintermediated entirely by LLMs. Hard to say what that means.
- deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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1oooqooq 1y ago
I pitty the fools thinking they will have access to anything because there's a MCP. those things will be hidden behind a dozen layers of payment validation and authentication. And whitelisted IPs (v4, of course). ERR 402; is all that will be visible to yall.
jacob019 1y ago
Fun writing, and something to think about. To me, Web 2.0 is kind of a joke; jQuery, REST, AJAX, CSS2, RSS, single page apps were going to change everything overnight, it was THE buzzword, and then... incremental improvements. In retrospect, everything did change, but that loose collection of technologies was just links in the chain of incremental progress. So yeah, Web 2.0 2.0 makes sense. I've seen a lot of talk around here, and everywhere, about MCP. A lot of enthusiasm and a lot of criticism. I've written a few MCP servers and plan to write some more. It isn't how I would design a protocol, but it works, and everyone is using it, so hooray for interoperability. I think the hype represents the wider enthusiasm that people have about this moment in time, and the transformative power of these new tools. It's easy to look at MCP and say there it is, now it's easy to connect these tools to the things that I care about, it feels accessible, and there's community. MCP is NOT the new TCP for AI. It is, essentially, an RPC layer for chat. And while it could be extended to a wider variety of use cases, I expect that it will remain primarily a method for wiring up tool calls for user-facing use cases. We recognize the power of these tools and anticipate deep changes to workflows and systems, but we don't know how that will shake out. If I am writing a classifier for a backend system, I am not going to use MCP, even if I could. Because it's inefficient. Every additional tool we offer the model consumes tokens and increases latency. I expect that the primary user of LLMs is going to be business automation of all kinds, and I don't expect them to reach for MCP to wire things up. Yeah, it's really cool to hook tools up to the chat, for that to feel accessible, to know how to do things in an idiomatic and standards-compliant way, that feels good! And yeah, the hype is overblown.
- riwsky 1y ago
  Don’t forget tags! Tags very 2.0, none of this straitjacketed directory-hierarchy-only mentality.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
no_wizard 1y ago
My hot take: MCP's value for the foreseeable future will be with automated testing
timwis 1y ago
Isn’t conformance to a standard API arguably less necessary now that LLMs can read API docs and adapt? For me, the win is the expectation that sites _have_ an API, whether it conforms to the MCP spec or not.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  -API documentation may have been poorly written. -Even with good documentation, the LLM may generate incorrect code to interact with API. (If you fix the generated code and just have the LLM call that code to interact with the API, then you're on your way to an intermediary in any case. You're basically building an "MCP-like" server.) -Security or resource allocation issues when giving LLMs direct access to APIs. (LLM has limited knowledge of when API was last called. It could call too often and, if each call is expensive, generate surprise infrastructure bills.) -So on and so forth. Lots of other potential pain points solved by having something intermediate. Should that "something" be MCP? Reasonable people can disagree on that. Works well enough right now to get done what people need done I suppose.
  - what 1y ago
    Don’t all of these arguments apply to MCP as well?
foobarian 1y ago
> when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes I'm tickled pink that this generation imagines "old Unix dudes" as pedantic, when Unix was the ultimate "move fast and break things" rebellion against the MIT school. Some things never change :-)
phillipcarter 1y ago
The thing that a lot of people miss with MCP is that it's the right fit for enterprise software. LLMs, being universal translators, are the ideal glue between many disconnected systems that are extremely hard to connect without some fuzzy layer in between. And so that's why you see so much of the B2B SaaS world rolling out MCP servers, and internally at these companies, they're talking about how to re-jigger their APIs and restrictions for those APIs given different usage patterns. Yes, the protocol is not necessarily "enterprise ready" by various definitions, but as the author points out, this is not terribly important, and the history of standards shows us that even messy and "bad" things get widespread adoption because they hit the right notes at the right time for the right people.
- Flemlo 1y ago
  We have rest and openapi. That allows already for self discovery etc. Everyone who will offer mcp offers a good API anyway.
  - hirsin 1y ago
    We don't need SDKs, they publish API docs. We don't need packages or functions, we can just write the code ourselves, every time it's needed. We don't need compilers, the computer understands assembly already. It's a mismatch of use - MCP isn't about telling the LLM about the APIs. It's also about encapsulating and simplifying them so the LLM isn't manually figuring them out every single time from scratch.
    - yeahbruh 1y ago
      [dead]
    - 9dev 1y ago
      OpenAPI specs provide everything the LLM needs to understand an API. And if it can be simplified for the LLM while retaining functionality, why not simplify the API altogether, instead of implementing yet another entry point into the application? Just so nobody has to sit down for longer than the duration of a TikTok and design their API properly?
vasusen 1y ago
What worries me most about MCP isn't that the protocol is so poorly created, but that fixing/improving it is only at the mercy of internal teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. It doesn't seem like the folks who are coming up with the protocol are actual engineers trying to implement it as well. Vaguely seems like a Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
- TOMDM 1y ago
  Microsoft has joined the steering committee as well https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/github-microsoft-embrace-anthropics-spec-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data-sources/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/github-microsoft-embrace-a...
holografix 1y ago
MCP is a brilliant way to wrap pre-existing APIs with LLM interpretation and in a way, marking standard REST apis as outdated and soon you’ll see language calling it “legacy”. What could just be a simple api call or set of api calls combined into a single response now “must” be wrapped in an MCP server ensuring that LLM providers effectively take a cut of every api call.
devrandoom 1y ago
Won't this be used to spam AI with ads and "search engine optimization" equivalent?
1propionyl 1y ago
I don't know what to say other than "I sure hope not".
kwoff 1y ago
"MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~." Oh, goodie.
nektro 1y ago
nothing will replace the Web
justinclift 1y ago
Wonder how long it's going to be until someone makes an MCP server for controlling a cockroach (or similar)? For reference: * https://www.technologynetworks.com/informatics/news/robo-roach-scientists-have-created-a-remote-control-cyborg-cockroach-365385 https://www.technologynetworks.com/informatics/news/robo-roa... * https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-turned-cockroaches-into-cyborgs-giving-them-navigation-superpowers https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-turned-cockroaches-i... And many other examples going back more than a decade...

251 points by freediver 1y ago

cranberryturkey 1y ago

[flagged]

jansan 1y ago
What is that? What is the difference between Model Context Protocol and Model Control Protocol, and why are both AI related?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mylons 1y ago
ok?
rafram 1y ago
Why does an MCP server need my OpenAI API key? Isn't that kind of backwards? And doesn't it defeat the point of MCP, which is that one AI provider (OpenAI, whatever) can connect to many MCP servers?
- cranberryturkey 1y ago
  its only for inference and its optional.
madsmith 1y ago
Model Control Protocol is not Model Context Protocol. We might be suffering from too many acronyms. (Just to be clearer, I think you’re referencing on the wrong MCP)
- cranberryturkey 1y ago
  hmmm....what's the difference here so I can understand better? I developed this for use with roocode which supports MCP servers.
  - 85392_school 1y ago
    MCP is Model Context Protocol, a standardized API for declaring remote tools for AI to call. Roo Code supports Model Context Protocol, not your creation.
    - cranberryturkey 1y ago
      I updated the readme
- 725686 1y ago
  That would be a TMA
- 98codes 1y ago
  We ran out of acronyms some time in the late 2000s I think; ever since then, name collisions everywhere.

lxgr 1y ago

Turns out the “Semantic Web” was a syntactic web all along, and maybe this is the real deal?

jaredcwhite 1y ago

MCP is not an open standard. People routinely mistake "protocol specification uploaded to GitHub, PRs welcome" as open standards. They are not. Calling them "open protocols" because they are open source, not open standards (no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol!) is essentially a form of openwashing. This has been happening way too frequently lately (see also: ATProto), and it really needs to be called out.

Toritori12 1y ago
I guess it is a first step... a lot of current "open" protocols started as proprietary.
- croes 1y ago
  The first step should include more security.
nicoburns 1y ago
> no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol! Is a standards body being involved relevant? Many standards ratified by standards bodies are "pay to access" and seem much less open than many de facto standards where no standards body was involved.
- isodev 1y ago
  > Is a standards body being involved relevant? I believe it is. Taking the example of ATproto, it boils down to a managed platform as a service but they seem to do a #BuildInPublic thing where we can experience early developer previews. That’s not really open and it isn’t a standard.
  - philosophty 1y ago
    How are these not "open" if they're GitHub projects and entirely open source and open to outside contribution? The organizations that create "standards" are much less open than this, requiring in person lobbying, schmoozing, travel, and company affiliations.

bad_haircut72 1y ago

"The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them." I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down. It makes me wonder how much functionality of things like AI searching the web for us (sorry, doing "deep-research") might have been solved in better ways. We could have had restaurants publish their menus in a metadata format and anyone could write a python script to say find the cheapest tacos in Texas, but no, the left hand locks down data behind artificial barriers and then the right hand builds AI (datacenters and all) to get around it. On a macro level its just plain stupid.

fidotron 1y ago
> I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down. I think this is right. MCP resembles robots.txt evolved into some higher lifeform, but it's still very much "describe your resources for us to exploit them". The reason the previous agent wave died (it was a Java thing in the 90s) was eventually everyone realized they couldn't trust their code once it was running on a machine it's supposed to be negotiating with. Fundamentally there is an information assymetry problem between interacting agents, entirely by design. Take that away and huge swathes of society will stop functioning.
- arbuge 1y ago
  "describe your resources for us to exploit them" What you want to do is offer resources that make you money when they're "exploited".
  - fidotron 1y ago
    I would agree with that if there were no distinction between clients and servers. i.e. agents and LLMs are resources that should be discovered and exploited in the same exact way as anything else, and switchable in the same ways. The whole thing reminds me of stuff like Alan Kay's legendary OOPSLA talk in 1997 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY ) "Every object should have an IP" (Also "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano Dijkstras").

tagfowufe 1y ago

While I understand where the author is coming from, and I get his sentiment(s), I don't think what he proposes is actually possible: his vision relies on faux open tools and protocols and having access to walled gardens. The means of computation for these kinds of things are owned by a tiny minority. Nearly everything is a SaaS or is based, one way or the other, on rent extraction. We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice. >There is a chance, though, that younger developers, and those who weren't around to build back during that last era a generation ago, are going to get inspired by MCP to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture. It was never meant to be proprietary. Alas, the reason APIs started closing and being metered is because, after all, there's someone owning and paying for the hardware upon which you are making calls and requests. As long as there's no way to agree upon how to have a bunch of servers providing computation for anyone and at the same time ensuring their upkeep without the need for a central authority, I don't think such vision is sustainable long term. The current state of the Internet is proof of it.

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auvrw 1y ago
> We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice. Isn't that so the spirit of the times when working with LLMs? If one asks for a Prisma schema or something else out of GipPTy meant to be fed into a traditional parser, we're up the the whims of the attention blocks and layers to write out something that doesn't become a parse error. One can turn the temperature down, fine-tune, or self-host a model but does that guarantee the syntax will be correct (much less the semantics)?

hansmayer 1y ago

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anildash 1y ago
My perspective on that might not be what you expect. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-weren...
- neonbrain 1y ago
  One of the best quotes by Thomas Sowell: "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
- tempodox 1y ago
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- hansmayer 1y ago
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  - drowntoge 1y ago
    He even got hansmayer's original comment flagged. Truly a champion of the open web we should all be backing!
    - anildash 1y ago
      I didn't flag it.
    - hansmayer 1y ago
      Correction: the champion of Web 2.0 2.0 - * whatever that means* :)
  - anildash 1y ago
    Not sure how many national magazines you’ve written for, but it is in fact fairly standard practice to write first-person essays in the first person. You did make up a whole bunch of people you don’t like in your example there, but literally none of them nap to what I did here, so I’m not sure what your enumerating except your lack of comprehension of the situation here. Hope that helps.

CSMastermind 1y ago

I really wish we'd learn from Web 2.0. All the mistakes of "hey everything has an API now" that we learned from we're back to repeating. I feel like that meme from Watchmen with the blue guy sitting on Mars.

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anildash 1y ago
Definitely having that feeling a lot these days watching the cycles repeat. I am tired of earth. These people. Their APIs.
olalonde 1y ago
What mistakes are we repeating?
- thuanao 1y ago
  Not understanding that businesses don't want open data or open protocols. Internet businesses want to monopolize information and charge rent for it. Capitalists don't want to commodify software, as that means lower profits and competition. They want to monopolize it. That's the whole game, except for companies selling physical goods over the Internet.
  - olalonde 1y ago
    So, is the idea that MCP might benefit from more built-in support for things like paid APIs to incentivize businesses?
    - thuanao 1y ago
      I think so. Though the premise of MCP betrays that AI isn't human-level intelligent. If it was there would be no need for a standard interface. It would be able to read API docs, navigate UIs to generate the proper keys, enter in billing info, and use all of that to make API requests by trial and error. That's what humans do.

munificent 1y ago

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anildash 1y ago
I’m furious about it, I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that. As it turns out, when I write about the threat to democracy, HN doesn’t actually let the link survive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607135
- munificent 1y ago
  > I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that. I get that and maybe it's just me but it really fell flat. The world is on fire and it's reasonable to take a break from writing about that sad reality but in that case, I'd rather the writing not mention it at all instead of making me think about the horrorshow but then making light of it. Your article about Procurement Capture is spot on.
  - anildash 1y ago
    I get it, we’re all sort of running into the brutality of the descent into authoritarianism at different times and in different ways all the time, we’ll be out of sync with our respective senses of whether we can process it as grief or absurdity or anger or fatigue or whatever at different times. I don’t fault anybody for feeling my tone is off if they’re not in the same mindset at the point when they’re reading.
    - broost3r 1y ago
      anil, your tone is spot on. keep it up. most of us enjoy it. source: decade-old HN lurker acct who lurked for years before that until registering
- pvg 1y ago
  HN can't fit everyone's writing about 'the threat to democracy', beside the fact it's not really HNs remit. DOGE was still the most discussed topic on HN in the weeks after its establishment. The idea that HN didn't 'let you' is pretty spurious and (however understandably) self-absorbed.

kristianc 1y ago

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quotemstr 1y ago

People said the same thing about "APIs" 10-15 years ago when they were a craze. Everything had to be an API! Doesn't matter whether it made sense to not. It's going to change the world! We're going to have San Francisco events with microbrews for APIs! Everyone's going to publish API frameworks! Let me make api-blog-blog.blogger.blog! Blah. Bay Area Tech regularly goes through these bursts of baseless enthusiasm for rehashes of existing technology. Is MCP useful? Yeah, probably. Is the current froth based on anything but SF-scene self-licking-ice-cream-code social cred? No.

almog 1y ago
Every bubble and its WSDL moment...
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rglover 1y ago
> Bay Area Tech regularly goes through these bursts of baseless enthusiasm for rehashes of existing technology. Is MCP useful? Yeah, probably. Is the current froth based on anything but SF-scene self-licking-ice-cream-code social cred? No. Thank you. You said what I was going to say. Another goose chase for something that's valuable, certainly, but being frothed up into some mythical sword in the stone. It's ultimately just a way to say "hey, here's some extra context including some functions we have defined on our server that you can ask us to call."
adidoit 1y ago
Exactly. Ultimately the economic incentives rather than tech frothiness will tell. One thing different from APIs is the LLM makers get tokens for every MCP call so they have incentives to hype this up significantly. MCP is useful - i use it quite a bit internally for some testing/QA workflows. However, the hype level is disproportionate to utility.

daemonk 1y ago

At a higher level, MCP seems wants to enforce a standard where no standard exists. I get that the low level technical implementation allows AI to utilize these tools. But there doesn't seem to be any standardization or method in how to describe the tool to the AI so that it can utilize it well. And I guess part of the power of AI is that you shouldn't need to standardize that? But shouldn't there at least be some way to describe the tool's functionality in natural language or give some context to the tool?

awestroke 1y ago
Each prompt, tool or resource fetched from an MCP server includes a name, description and a schema. What more do you want? https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/server/tools https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/ser...

quantadev 1y ago

We can now build the Semantic Web. All we have to do is create a tiny protocol (as an optional extension to MCP) for how organizations can share their SQL Table Create DDL as a static file that MCP apps can read, to understand data, and then, using the already-existing tools for AI/LLM function calling to SQL, that would become a Semantic Web. That would fill the missing link that always held back the Semantic Web which was the lack of any incentive for companies to bother to use a standard "Data Type" rather than all proprietary data types. Once we have an MCPQ (MCP with Queries), suddenly there's an incentive for organizations to collaborate at the data structure layer.

somat 1y ago

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vivzkestrel 1y ago

Everything seems to be susceptible to enshittification and so far I see no evidence that MCP is any exception. First the value will go to users, then the users ll cut short to drive value to shareholders and then it will turn to an absolute pile of garbage as businesses make every attempt to somehow cash in on this

yupitsme123 1y ago
It's a protocol. The new version of the web that gets built with it may get shitty, but like HTTP or TCP, the protocol stands on its own merits and can be used freely to build cool stuff outside of that shitty ecosystem.

RansomStark 1y ago

MCP could have cracked the web opeb. The terrible standard was all about clients and local servers all on the same host. Imagine it, everything is open, servers are as simple as a pip install ... You have full control of what servers you install. What functions you turn on, what access you allow. Now everyone and their blog is sticking MCPs on their servers and locking them down behind subscriptions and paywalls. What a wasted opportunity.

freeone3000 1y ago
And what pays for the resources used serving your (hundreds of) requests against a “local” server? For computer control, sure, but actual remote services have actual remote costs.

cryptonector 1y ago

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zoogeny 1y ago

> Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes I think that is one of the reasons (among many others) that the semantic web failed (which doesn't contradict the author, whose point is literally the worse-is-better mantra). People really leaned into the eXtensible part of XML and I think a certain amount of fatigue set it. XSL, XHTML, XSD, WSDL, XSLT, RDF, RSS, et al. just became a bit too much. It was architecture astronautics for data formats when what the world at the time needed was simple interchange formats (and JSON fit the bill). But I actually believe XML's time has come. I've noticed that XML appears a lot in leaked system prompts from places like Anthropic. LLMs appear to work very well with structured text formats (Markdown and XML specifically). I believe that MCP is the wrong model, though. I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves.

MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
Two years ago he would have written „pedantic white old Unix dudes“.
- M4rkJW 1y ago
  True, though "dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled" made it pretty clear who he was targeting.
mdaniel 1y ago
> I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves. How could that possibly work for the cases that people want the intern to solve for them? If they knew the information ahead of time, presumably they'd just solve the problem by themselves I get the impression that the value folks get from MCP is "run some query for me, don't make me learn how to glue together 15 sources"
- zoogeny 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your objection. You seem to imply that knowing the context is the same as knowing the solution to the problem the context provides? Let me think of an example here. Context needed to determine if there is cancer in a radiology scan would be the contents of the scan. So there are two modes here, one I say "LLM please tell me if there is cancer in this patients scan" and the LLM makes an MCP call to load the patients report. The second mode is I say "LLM, here is the patients radiology scan, can you tell me if it has signs of cancer". The first example is what I was calling a "pull" model and the second example is what I am calling a "push" model.

nimish 1y ago

Rent seeking is the name of the game for much of b2b SaaS. MCP is an attempt to make that easy, but the issue here is that a lot of the companies offering integration could be disintermediated entirely by LLMs. Hard to say what that means.

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1oooqooq 1y ago

I pitty the fools thinking they will have access to anything because there's a MCP. those things will be hidden behind a dozen layers of payment validation and authentication. And whitelisted IPs (v4, of course). ERR 402; is all that will be visible to yall.

jacob019 1y ago

Fun writing, and something to think about. To me, Web 2.0 is kind of a joke; jQuery, REST, AJAX, CSS2, RSS, single page apps were going to change everything overnight, it was THE buzzword, and then... incremental improvements. In retrospect, everything did change, but that loose collection of technologies was just links in the chain of incremental progress. So yeah, Web 2.0 2.0 makes sense. I've seen a lot of talk around here, and everywhere, about MCP. A lot of enthusiasm and a lot of criticism. I've written a few MCP servers and plan to write some more. It isn't how I would design a protocol, but it works, and everyone is using it, so hooray for interoperability. I think the hype represents the wider enthusiasm that people have about this moment in time, and the transformative power of these new tools. It's easy to look at MCP and say there it is, now it's easy to connect these tools to the things that I care about, it feels accessible, and there's community. MCP is NOT the new TCP for AI. It is, essentially, an RPC layer for chat. And while it could be extended to a wider variety of use cases, I expect that it will remain primarily a method for wiring up tool calls for user-facing use cases. We recognize the power of these tools and anticipate deep changes to workflows and systems, but we don't know how that will shake out. If I am writing a classifier for a backend system, I am not going to use MCP, even if I could. Because it's inefficient. Every additional tool we offer the model consumes tokens and increases latency. I expect that the primary user of LLMs is going to be business automation of all kinds, and I don't expect them to reach for MCP to wire things up. Yeah, it's really cool to hook tools up to the chat, for that to feel accessible, to know how to do things in an idiomatic and standards-compliant way, that feels good! And yeah, the hype is overblown.

riwsky 1y ago
Don’t forget tags! Tags very 2.0, none of this straitjacketed directory-hierarchy-only mentality.
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no_wizard 1y ago

My hot take: MCP's value for the foreseeable future will be with automated testing

timwis 1y ago

Isn’t conformance to a standard API arguably less necessary now that LLMs can read API docs and adapt? For me, the win is the expectation that sites _have_ an API, whether it conforms to the MCP spec or not.

bilbo0s 1y ago
-API documentation may have been poorly written. -Even with good documentation, the LLM may generate incorrect code to interact with API. (If you fix the generated code and just have the LLM call that code to interact with the API, then you're on your way to an intermediary in any case. You're basically building an "MCP-like" server.) -Security or resource allocation issues when giving LLMs direct access to APIs. (LLM has limited knowledge of when API was last called. It could call too often and, if each call is expensive, generate surprise infrastructure bills.) -So on and so forth. Lots of other potential pain points solved by having something intermediate. Should that "something" be MCP? Reasonable people can disagree on that. Works well enough right now to get done what people need done I suppose.
- what 1y ago
  Don’t all of these arguments apply to MCP as well?

foobarian 1y ago

> when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes I'm tickled pink that this generation imagines "old Unix dudes" as pedantic, when Unix was the ultimate "move fast and break things" rebellion against the MIT school. Some things never change :-)

phillipcarter 1y ago

The thing that a lot of people miss with MCP is that it's the right fit for enterprise software. LLMs, being universal translators, are the ideal glue between many disconnected systems that are extremely hard to connect without some fuzzy layer in between. And so that's why you see so much of the B2B SaaS world rolling out MCP servers, and internally at these companies, they're talking about how to re-jigger their APIs and restrictions for those APIs given different usage patterns. Yes, the protocol is not necessarily "enterprise ready" by various definitions, but as the author points out, this is not terribly important, and the history of standards shows us that even messy and "bad" things get widespread adoption because they hit the right notes at the right time for the right people.

Flemlo 1y ago
We have rest and openapi. That allows already for self discovery etc. Everyone who will offer mcp offers a good API anyway.
- hirsin 1y ago
  We don't need SDKs, they publish API docs. We don't need packages or functions, we can just write the code ourselves, every time it's needed. We don't need compilers, the computer understands assembly already. It's a mismatch of use - MCP isn't about telling the LLM about the APIs. It's also about encapsulating and simplifying them so the LLM isn't manually figuring them out every single time from scratch.
  - yeahbruh 1y ago
    [dead]
  - 9dev 1y ago
    OpenAPI specs provide everything the LLM needs to understand an API. And if it can be simplified for the LLM while retaining functionality, why not simplify the API altogether, instead of implementing yet another entry point into the application? Just so nobody has to sit down for longer than the duration of a TikTok and design their API properly?

vasusen 1y ago

What worries me most about MCP isn't that the protocol is so poorly created, but that fixing/improving it is only at the mercy of internal teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. It doesn't seem like the folks who are coming up with the protocol are actual engineers trying to implement it as well. Vaguely seems like a Visa-Mastercard duopoly.

TOMDM 1y ago
Microsoft has joined the steering committee as well https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/github-microsoft-embrace-anthropics-spec-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data-sources/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/github-microsoft-embrace-a...

holografix 1y ago

MCP is a brilliant way to wrap pre-existing APIs with LLM interpretation and in a way, marking standard REST apis as outdated and soon you’ll see language calling it “legacy”. What could just be a simple api call or set of api calls combined into a single response now “must” be wrapped in an MCP server ensuring that LLM providers effectively take a cut of every api call.

devrandoom 1y ago

Won't this be used to spam AI with ads and "search engine optimization" equivalent?

1propionyl 1y ago

I don't know what to say other than "I sure hope not".

kwoff 1y ago

"MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~." Oh, goodie.

nektro 1y ago

nothing will replace the Web

justinclift 1y ago

Wonder how long it's going to be until someone makes an MCP server for controlling a cockroach (or similar)? For reference: * https://www.technologynetworks.com/informatics/news/robo-roach-scientists-have-created-a-remote-control-cyborg-cockroach-365385 https://www.technologynetworks.com/informatics/news/robo-roa... * https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-turned-cockroaches-into-cyborgs-giving-them-navigation-superpowers https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-turned-cockroaches-i... And many other examples going back more than a decade...