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Sure but there are established alternatives for that also. The internet supports looking up DNS records (A, MX, SRV, TXT, etc), the web offers /.well-known as a

Sure but there are established alternatives for that also. The internet supports looking up DNS records (A, MX, SRV, TXT, etc), the web offers /.well-known as a place to store things like API endpoint specs, etc. The main difference with MCP is that the discoverability comes with the stream-oriented communication semantics.

anon7000 1y ago
Well, you’re basically saying that different domains have different solutions to this problem. There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery, and what exists are very specific to those domains.
- achierius 1y ago
  I don't think it's accurate to describe .well-known as "very specific to [a domain]"
  - rexer 1y ago
    It’s at least restricted to http servers. Certainly more once you include domain specific conventions
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery, and what exists are very specific to those domains. I commented elsewhere on this recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063680, but a huge value of LLMs is you don't need a "universally accepted way to do client discovery" - if you have an exposed API that already supports one of the bajillion standards that expose schema information (e.g. Swagger/OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP, etc.), then any decent LLM should just be able to figure out how to use it. This idea that we need "one more universal interop standard to rule them all" seems to me like a very pre-LLM way of thinking.
  - throwaway81523 1y ago
    Oh great, just what I need for my finance stack, an API with built in AI hallucinations :/
  - nsonha 1y ago
    the thing with building interconnected software is that we should resist the urge to just let the AI perform magic and somehow reliably mix and match all these overlapping things. We should have ONE clearly defined contract. There is no evidence that this principle can be challenged even at the current state of LLM.
  - cma 1y ago
    > if you have an exposed API that already supports one of the bajillion standards that expose schema information I don't know jf they are doing it well with MCP, but if a solution has one extra round trip in the model for a dependent read it has to reprocess the entire context or store it into a cache hierarchy possibly burning several hundred gigs of ssd write durability if it isn't a short enough time to cache in system RAM.
- halfcat 1y ago
  > There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery Someone should really create a protocol to transfer hyper text where clients could discover resources through embedded links in documents

anon7000 1y ago

Well, you’re basically saying that different domains have different solutions to this problem. There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery, and what exists are very specific to those domains.

achierius 1y ago
I don't think it's accurate to describe .well-known as "very specific to [a domain]"
- rexer 1y ago
  It’s at least restricted to http servers. Certainly more once you include domain specific conventions
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery, and what exists are very specific to those domains. I commented elsewhere on this recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063680, but a huge value of LLMs is you don't need a "universally accepted way to do client discovery" - if you have an exposed API that already supports one of the bajillion standards that expose schema information (e.g. Swagger/OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP, etc.), then any decent LLM should just be able to figure out how to use it. This idea that we need "one more universal interop standard to rule them all" seems to me like a very pre-LLM way of thinking.
- throwaway81523 1y ago
  Oh great, just what I need for my finance stack, an API with built in AI hallucinations :/
- nsonha 1y ago
  the thing with building interconnected software is that we should resist the urge to just let the AI perform magic and somehow reliably mix and match all these overlapping things. We should have ONE clearly defined contract. There is no evidence that this principle can be challenged even at the current state of LLM.
- cma 1y ago
  > if you have an exposed API that already supports one of the bajillion standards that expose schema information I don't know jf they are doing it well with MCP, but if a solution has one extra round trip in the model for a dependent read it has to reprocess the entire context or store it into a cache hierarchy possibly burning several hundred gigs of ssd write durability if it isn't a short enough time to cache in system RAM.
halfcat 1y ago
> There isn’t a universally accepted way to do client discovery Someone should really create a protocol to transfer hyper text where clients could discover resources through embedded links in documents