19 ms·

MCP is eating the world

339 points by emschwartz 1y ago

dboreham 1y ago
Still confused as to why the super-smart LLM needed humans to create a proxy to every existing protocol. Why couldn't it write client code for all those protocols itself?
- owebmaster 1y ago
  LLMs hallucinate, MCP restrains the options available.
0x500x79 1y ago
I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed. MCP allows you to bring tools to agents you don't control. It's awesome, but it isn't the right match for every problem. If you believe the hype of X/LinkedIn you would think that MCP everywhere is going to be the solution. Bringing tools to your local Claude client is awesome, but there are still challenges with MCP that need to be solved and like all technology, it isn't applicable universally. Not to mention it's a recipe for burning tokens!
- tempodox 1y ago
  > … agents you don't control. It's awesome … What have we come to when losing control in software development is called “awesome”.
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    WOW talk about quoting out of context.
  - 0x500x79 1y ago
    I don't think that the goal of MCP is for software developers. MCP is great for: "I would like Claude Desktop/VSCode/Cursor to know about my JIRA tickets". AFAIK Most of the tools that are being used for AI Coding tools are not delivered through MCP.
    - tempodox 1y ago
      Still, in what world is delegating the stuff you want to do to machines you have no control over a good idea?
  - 0x457 1y ago
    Do you get mad at IDE plugins that let you extend software that you don't control?
- theOGognf 1y ago
  Along with burning tokens, how MCP servers are ran and managed is resource wasteful. Running a whole Docker container just to have some model call a single API? Want to call a small CLI utility, people say to run another Docker container for that Feels like a monolith would be better
  - MaxLeiter 1y ago
    Remote MCPs should resolve some of this
  - MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
    A "whole Docker container" is not very heavyweight. Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM.
    - jcelerier 1y ago
      > Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM. why does the smallest script take seconds to even start then?
      - stingraycharles 1y ago
        That is not normal. Small scripts should launch in milliseconds, not several seconds.
      - antonvs 1y ago
        Below is a transcript of a "smallest script" which runs in 328 ms total on my machine. And that includes loading an ubuntu OS image, which could be optimized depending on what dependencies the script needs. Of course, if you're invoking it on a remote cluster, there are many reasons it can talk longer, especially if the cluster has to scale to satisfy the request. But all those reasons are nothing to do with containers specifically - it's things like cluster capacity, node provisioning time, container pull time, network latency, etc. If you architect things properly, you can get the number below + network latency even for a remote cluster invocation. $ time docker run ubuntu echo hello world hello world real 0m0.328s user 0m0.011s sys 0m0.010s
- pydry 1y ago
  It's not the solution to every problem but it's a great substitute for a infrequently used app with mediocre UX and most of the world's apps probably do fall into that category actually.
  - 0x500x79 1y ago
    Agree, but I think we should hold those Apps to a higher bar. Chat interfaces are not a replacement for good UX.
    - pydry 1y ago
      Have you tried holding Jira to a higher bar? I don't know how. I'd rather somebody just layered a conversational UX over it.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed MCP is pretty cool, but the way every AI influencer pivoted to producing MCP glorification posts at the same time has been groan-inducing. I can usually ignore the hype cycles, but I've been bombarded with so much MCP influencer content in the past few months that I feel exhausted every time I see those three letters.
  - 0x500x79 1y ago
    It never fails that if you look at their title it's: VP of XYZ at something.ai as well!
  - qsort 1y ago
    It's basically the story of the last 3 years. Can't ignore the technology, but every loser grifter in existence has been on AI full time. On average, the more they are fanatics of it, the less they're able to take advantage of what it actually can do, most often due to an inordinate amount of skill issues unrelated to AI.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      When the crypto bubble burst, the fad chasers had to go somewhere. It is a tale as old as time.
      - roenxi 1y ago
        Which crypto bubble burst? The Bitcoin price still appears to be at all-time highs.
        Eisenstein 1y ago
        I'm sure your bitcoin are fine, seeing as the entrenched financial institutions and the old money crowd invested in them, their value isn't going to go down; nice to be part of that crowd I am sure. You may want to check in on NFTs, Terra Luna, Celsius, Safe Moon, SQUID, and FTX. I think they might not be at all time highs.
- pphysch 1y ago
  MCP is a major lifeline for OpenAI and Anthropic. Their only reasonable way to compete with the big vertical AI integrators is if the "community" does all the hard work of integration, hence MCP. After the initial burst of greenfield enthusiasm I suspect it will stagnate as a yet another maintenance burden.
  - nsonha 1y ago
    Any kind of open extensions can be framed as "lifeline" but it's also the only way a platform can evolve and actually cater to consumers' need. The alternative is the company somehow knowing how every consumer thinks. It can happen over time just not on any realistic time frame. If it take too long it's not exactly great for the people building on the platform either.
  - visarga 1y ago
    Simple - you use MCP agents to update your MCP servers. I made 2 MCPs both 100% vibe coded. Keep the constraints - docs+tests - and you can regenerate the code as needed.
- fiatjaf 1y ago
  You just said the same thing three times and didn't explain why.
nisegami 1y ago
It isn't hard to see why. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around why MCP was necessary and useful but I tried using* one recently and it's remarkable how big the gap between just being able to reply and being able to interact is. *after forking and modifying it for my use case
- dack 1y ago
  yeah current AIs are surprisingly good at figuring out which tools to call and how to call them!
- prismatix 1y ago
  I'm curious to hear which one you forked and found useful? I've looked at the awesome MCP list but was a bit struck by decision paralysis when trying to figure out what to try, so I ended up just not trying any.
  - nisegami 1y ago
    We use an outdated on-premise version of Azure DevOps (nee. Team Foundation Server) for our sorry excuse of task management. We also use some horrible plugin for time tracking so our bosses can be sure we're keeping the seat warm for the correct amount of time. I forked [this existing MCP server for azure devops](https://github.com/Tiberriver256/mcp-server-azure-devops https://github.com/Tiberriver256/mcp-server-azure-devops) but I had to make a lot of changes to have it work on our env and I also added some tools for working with that shitty time tracking plugin.
    - prismatix 1y ago
      Ah, got it. Thank you!
ge96 1y ago
Finally the rapping spider makes it big
- nickpeterson 1y ago
  This is an aqua teen hunger force reference?
- mekael 1y ago
  I want candy, bubblegum, and taffy…
  - tempodox 1y ago
    Doesn't everyone get a unicorn?
dansiemens 1y ago
MCP is currently too difficult to setup and too complicated for consumers to understand. Once somebody big enough figures out distribution and integration a la the App Store, and the market starts to understand MCP integrations as extensions your AI client can orchestrate across (do one thing in App A, another in App B, etc all with a single prompt), it’ll be off to the races.
- csomar 1y ago
  MCP is too simple actually. You just use one command? I think the problem is that most MCP "servers" do not work. They are either too early/alpha, not well supported, too limited, etc. Everyone is trying to write blog post but not actually do the product development.
  - Maxious 1y ago
    Can we split the difference that if one of you say it's simple and one of you say it's too complex, we have reached the juuust right zone.
  - svachalek 1y ago
    This is true. Most of the MCP servers I have seen are also some of the worst examples of software I have ever seen. Given the people who are attracted to it, it's likely they're all vibe coded.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    Installing even a single command is not tenable for the vast majority of non technical users of software, not even Claude desktop users.
time0ut 1y ago
In some ways MCP is like the next evolution of API over HTTP. We've exposed our APIs as SOAP endpoints. These were not well suited to web based clients, leading to the development of "RESTful" JSON endpoints. As web clients became more complex, GraphQL arose as a solution to some of the problems encountered. Maybe MCP is the next step. I don't mean that MCP will supersede these protocols. My company exposes our endpoints as SOAP, REST, and GraphQL still as they fit different use cases and customer bases. We are piloting an MCP version to see how that goes now. It is fun to work on something new and play with agents to see how they consume our endpoints in this form. I think there is a lot of potential.
- v3ss0n 1y ago
  Unecessary complication. LLM Can call tools without MCP 100% fine. You don't need a Stateful SSE JSORPC Meshedup server running APIs rebraneded as tools at somewhere on the cloud .
  - taude 1y ago
    I think there's going to be a lot of places where you want the middleare that's only exposing a sub-set of apis. and the Ideas that you copy some URL, put it in your LLM Client, and then it magically gets all the tools/endpoints available to you, and you start interacting with it, simplifies the process greatly for a lot of users. No swagger, no http post, body vs params, etc....just play with with your prompt sentance until you get it to do what you want. (edit: sorry, I responded to wrong thread.)
    - v3ss0n 1y ago
      Yeah that but - Why SSE? - Why JsonRPC - Why Statefulness REST based Tool Call Server would work 100% fine. Now auth have to be redone for those specifically. And for users of MCP Tools - they are sending a lot of their information to whatever service they are running - that they have never control of For developer it is not necessary and security nightmare if you use someone's MCP service or run your own. For users , it is a privacy nightmare .
  - 1y ago
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
I'm still getting the hang of this but Apple's Foundation Models framework [1] (the one recently announced in WWDC) follows this protocol, correct? Does this mean that MCP, as a protocol, can actually take on different forms depending on how platforms/OSes want to allow their users to integrate with LLMs? [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels
- neomantra 1y ago
  Apple’s Foundation Models support “tool calling”, but that is not MCP. It is a different approach that those interested in MCP should check out, via Swift protocols and macros. Notably I think the structured Swift marshalling is cool. An understated part of WWDC this year.
thm 1y ago
That Google Trends curve does/will look a bit like Smart Contracts.
- hk__2 1y ago
  > That Google Trends curve does/will look a bit like Smart Contracts. What do you mean? The curve for "Small Contract" is mostly flat compared to MCP: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Smart%20Contract,MCP&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Smart%20Contract,...
- spinlock_ 1y ago
  I guess more like Blockchain.
ravenstine 1y ago
> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November, but it suddenly blew up in February, 3 months later. Wow, the idea of what's "new" in software has always been really short, but damn, it's becoming questionable whether anything can be considered new these days.
- dack 1y ago
  yeah it's crazy to think that claude 4 has only been out a month. And the previous iteration 3.7 was launched only in February! but also I think the interesting thing is that people didn't jump on MCP immediately after it launched - it seemed to go almost unnoticed until February. Very unusual for AI tech - I guess it took time for servers to get built, clients to support the protocol, and for the protocol itself to go through a few revisions before people really understood the value.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  Yeah, if this was the Javascript ecosystem 3 months would mean the original implementation has been moved to maintenance mode and only gets security updates from here forward. Everyone would need to start migrating to the replacement as soon as possible.
dack 1y ago
MCP still feels so early. It's getting better - we went from "set up `npx` on your system and edit this JSON file in an obscure directory" to "set the name and URL of your MCP server" in claude.ai. But you're right, even knowing how to find a URL for the MCP server is a tall order for most. I wonder what the optimal form factor is. Like what if your AI could /suggest/ connecting with some service? Like your AI is browsing a site and can discover the "official" MCP server (like via llms.txt). It then shows a prompt to the user - "can I access your data via X provider?". you click "yes", then it does the OAuth redirect and can immediately access the necessary tools. Also being able to give specific permissions via the OAuth flow would be really nice.
pabzu 1y ago
Another hyped/clickbait headline about a "new technology" that will "transform everything" written by a company that sells this "new technology".
- sylens 1y ago
  I just saw some job postings asking for 8+ years experience in MCP
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    You need 10+ for senior though.
  - olddustytrail 1y ago
    I think you're joking but if not I'd love to see one!
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    >> >> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November woosh!
  - saulpw 1y ago
    1 year for a human is like 10 in AI-years.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Not a problem for the 15x programmer.
    - kibwen 1y ago
      15x is a rookie multiplier, do you need me to explain how exponential curves work? Within mere months I'll need to start resorting to up-arrow notation to express my value as a developer. And someday I might even start making more money too!
  - steve_adams_86 1y ago
furyofantares 1y ago
I have various scripts that I tell claude about in all my CLAUDE.md files and it is successful at using them. Am I missing out on something by not using an MCP? I guess I wouldn't have to paste it into every CLAUDE.md but is there any other noticeable advantage?
- ashwinsundar 1y ago
  You don't need to aspire to use "MCP", but rather select some MCP servers that will be useful for you. MCP servers basically expose pieces of the web/data that your LLM client has not been trained on. Maybe some private APIs, or internal data that isn't part of training data sets. Real-time data is another good use case. This list has a lot of ideas: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-o... I personally use the Kagi MCP server (allows an LLM client to execute searches against the Kagi search engine), and stochastic thinking/sequential thinking (some alternate thought patterns that help models escape the "valley of optimization" problem). You can't tell Claude.md to "use the Kagi search engine"...it doesn't have an API key to do that. The MCP server basically just exposes the API. You're right, it's a lot less exciting than people make it sound. The future possibilities are where the excitement is at imo. I'm excited about MCP more from a developer side, than from a user side. It really does feel like the first week of mobile apps still. Will it "revolutionize everything"? No, just like mobile apps didn't solve every problem (and made some worse).
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    I can see the value if I'm connecting to MCPs other people have written. Or sharing MCPs for a team. As a solo dev though, I don't know of any MCPs that are really valuable to me that aren't more valuable exposed as a commandline tool. I have an "imagine" tool that creates/edits images and audio with various services available to it and guidance on how to use it, I have a "think" command that allows claude or (scripts claude or I write) to use different LLMs for different things and with a library of prompts for specialized tasks, etc. I don't have a kagi command but tbh that sounds useful and I may write a little wrapper for it so I can have it from the terminal too, rather than use an MCP. (None of this is a complaint about MCP btw - just not sure if I'm missing anything that would make it also useful to me right now.) Something I am interested in, is if claude code would do better with access to a language server. I love how claude produces most of it's diffs by string replace, rather than producing a diff and using an "apply model" like cursor does; but it seems it would be better off if it could "go to definition", "find references", and "rename" rather than use grep etc. I do see one project in the list you linked to that seems like it's going for that. Although again I'm not sure if that's better than having a language server cli available.
revskill 1y ago
So MCP is basically: - getTools - executeTool ?
- ukuina 1y ago
  Shh, that'll blow up the hype bubble.
- zingababba 1y ago
  Yeah but an LLM is doing it so the outcome is different every time ;)
remram 1y ago
I tried using MCP to run some custom functions from ollama & openwebui. The experience was not great. Doing anything with LLM feels more like arguing than debugging, but this was really surreal: I can see the LLM calling the function with the parameters I requested, but then instead of giving me the returned value, the LLM always pretends it doesn't know the function and tries to guess what the result should be based on its name. The protocol itself is really weird, almost based on standards but not quite. It was made by one vendor to fix one problem. It has the benefit of existing, but I don't know if it is worthy of any praise?
- never_inline 1y ago
  I mean, LLMs you can run on ollama are usually pretty bad ones.
- svachalek 1y ago
  I don't know what model you're using through ollama but a lot of people pick up a 4b model and expect it to be ChatGPT when it's like 0.2% of the size. 4b models are mostly toys imo. The latest generation of 8b models are sometimes useful, but often still laughably stupid. 14b starts to have potential, 30b are pretty good. But remember, the hosted frontier models are still gigantic compared to these, and still make stupid mistakes all the time.
- csomar 1y ago
  Unless you are running DeepSeek/OpenAI/Anthropic models, I suspect your LLM will struggle with the complexity. That being said, except for Puppeteer and usebrowser, every MCP I have tried was complete sh+t. As: doesn't really work and will confuse the hell out of your LLM.
luketheobscure 1y ago
It's interesting how quickly my brain developed an AI detector for written language (this blog post screams ChatGPT). I wonder if it will stay effective, or if LLMs figure out a way around it? Or maybe it's just that this is the new way that technical blog posts are written, sort of how nearly all press releases feel univocal.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kitsune_ 1y ago
It's not.
faxmeyourcode 1y ago
Based on the comments here, a lot of folks are assuming the primary users of mcp are the end users connecting their claude/vscode/etc to whatever saas platform they're working on. While this _is_ a huge benefit and super cool to use, imo the main benefit is for things like giving complex tool access to centralized agents. Where the mcp servers allow you to build agents that have the tools to do a sort of "custom deep research." We have deployed this internally at work where business users are giving it a list of 20 jira tickets and asking it to summarize or classify them based on some fuzzy contextual reasoning found in the description/comments. It will happly run 50+ tool calls poking around in Jira/confluence and respond in a few seconds what would have taken them hours to do manually. The fact that it uses mcp under the hood is completely irrelevant but it makes our job as builders much much easier.
- zackify 1y ago
  I’ve managed to do the same thing! It’s actually surprising just how powerful 1-5 tools can be if you document it well and the llm knows how to pass arguments from other tool responses you had higher up in the thread
  - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
    Yep, we've built some really useful agents with some simple tools (3-5 templated snowflake queries with really good descriptions). The LLM is useful for shaping your question into function params and then interpreting the results based on the context it got from the tool description.
- dkdcio 1y ago
  Where I struggle conceptually is this works fine without MCP. Write a CLI tool that does the same thing (including external service access) and tell any agentic CLI tool (or Cursor or IDE tool) to use the tool. Much simpler, established security models, etc.
  - potatolicious 1y ago
    Sure, and MCP is just a standardized way of exposing tools. This is where I feel MCP is both overhyped (waaaaaaay too much LinkedIn influencer hot air) but also genuinely quite useful. I've done stuff very much like the above with just regular tool calls through the various LLM APIs, but there are tons of disparate frameworks for how to harness up a tool, how they execute, how they are discovered, etc. None of it is rocket science. But the nice thing about having a standard is that it's a well-lit path, but more importantly in the corporate workflow context is that it allows tools to be composed together really easily - often without any coding at all. An analyst who has zero coding experience can type in a prompt, click "add" on some MCP tools, and stand up a whole workflow in a minute or two. That's pretty cool. And yeah, none of it is impossible to implement yourself (nor even very hard!) but standardization has a value in and of itself in terms of lowering barriers to entry.
ramoz 1y ago
9 times out of 10 my Claude Code is using a bash script before I hook up an MCP to it. - less tokens required in context (CLAUDE.md vs CLAUDE.md + MCP bloat per request) - native agent tooling, relying on Bash(my-script params) - less black box (you & the coding agent can read the scripts) MCPs are often wrapping restful apis. Turns out agents can use those just fine.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  Yeah I wonder just how much MCP is needed when the models seem fine at making REST requests as is, especially if there's an OpenAPI or similar spec available.
klabb3 1y ago
I won’t speak to the technical merits of MCP but I will say this: it doesn’t matter for many use cases, in particular consumer tech. The entire digital consumer economy is built around ownership of the screen real estate, due to a simple reason: ads. Whoever owns the sidebar sets the rules, period. Web2.0 was all about APIs (usually Rest/json) and in hindsight we see a clear distinction on where they’re used: in commercial B2B apps. Conversely, big B2C players shut down the little open they had - Facebook, Gmail removed their XMPP support, and these days Twitter etc even gatekeep content when you’re not signed in or using the app, and aggressively fortify against even basic scraping. When you’re using other clients, you are bypassing their sidebar, meaning their opportunity to deliver ads. So no, your iOS apps and Twitter are not gonna ”open up” their APIs in any way, not through Rest and not through MCP, simply because it goes directly against their incentives. The exceptions are (1) temporary to ride a hype train, and (2) services you pay money for (but even that is wishful and hypothetical).
- ukuina 1y ago
  This is why CUAs are going to demolish all prior fences.
kloud 1y ago
The reason for MCP is that you get better results with optimized prompts rather than using existing API docstrings. So everybody is going to end up adopting it in some shape or form. It is a general concept, MCP itself is nothing special, it is that just that Anthropic formalized the observation first. Tool call = API call + instructions for LLM So vendors who provide APIs are going to write prompts, add a thin wrapper and out goes MCP. Or you create your own instructions and wrap in MCP to optimize your own workflows.
- mooreds 1y ago
  For pure OpenAPI APIs, why wouldn't you just update your API docstrings? Or maybe add a new attribute to the OpenAPI spec for LLM prompts? I definitely see the value if you have a non standard API or undocumented API you wanted to expose. And I see value in the resources and prompts parts of MCP, since they can offer clients more functionality that would be hard to put into an API spec.
  - kloud 1y ago
    Exactly, having some metadata on OpenAPI and then have a generic openapi-mcp-gateway seems like a useful approach. Or being it a part of a web framework, given routes also expose MCP endpoint. The takeaway is to go beyond the bare minimum and put the effort to optimize the docs/prompts, ideally having some evals in place. For the prompts and resources part of the spec I haven't found much use for those yet. It seems like output of tool calls is enough to get content into the context.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    MCP is winning against OpenAPI because there is no big VC behind openapi.
neuroelectron 1y ago
MCP, in its current form, functions as a fun and profit remote exploit vector, primarily because it exposes AI systems to a wide range of attacks through under-specified security controls, heavy reliance on natural language context, and the ability for untrusted servers to manipulate model behavior. While MCP aims to standardize and simplify tool integration for AI, its half-implemented security features and architectural choices have made it a high-risk protocol, especially when deployed without additional safeguards. A treasure trove of possibilities: OAuth tokens, almost impossible to build alarms for outside of transmission rates (what are you running your own LLM? How about a meta MCP for twice the API calls?) , assumed trusted input, the server can inject malicious instructions via tool descriptions, leading to prompt injection, data exfiltration, or even remote code execution, sometimes without any explicit tool use by the user.
- mkagenius 1y ago
  Unfortunately, the "protocol" doesn't have any emphasis on security so far, its all a repeat of HTTP -> HTTPS. However I feel the tooling built around MCP has been a lot and makes your work easier. The perfect use today would be using a locally running MCP servers for execution of code[1], manipulation of local files etc. 1. CodeRunner - Generate and run LLM code locally on Apple containers (https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner) (I am one of the authors)
- ezekiel68 1y ago
  Okay. I guess someone could have said the same thing at the dawn of the microcomputer era, too. Get back to us when the world melts down.
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    I think "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" doesn't apply to B2B services.
Animats 1y ago
> At Stainless, we’re betting it’s here to stay. By a seller of MCP. The trouble with MCP is that it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction. It's not like the ends negotiate a simple protocol so that later queries are cheap. That's a huge cost increase as traffic increases.
- rattray 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction"? In a normal case of "production software", yeah, you would not want to add an LLM in the middle to make an API call. That's silly – just write the code to make the API call if you can do it deterministically. If you're talking to an LLM in a chat experience, and you want that LLM to go interact with some foreign system (i.e., hit an API), you need _some way_ of teaching the LLM how to make that API call. MCP is one such way, and it's probably the easiest at this point. Doing it through MCP does introduce some latency due to a proxy server, but it doesn't introduce an additional LLM "in the middle". (Disclaimer: I work at Stainless. Note that we actually sell SDKs at Stainless; our MCP generator is free.)
- taberiand 1y ago
  There is no reason you couldn't design the system to hand off to a simple protocol through an MCP call, it's entirely up to what works in the specific situation. There is nothing in the design that mandates a path through the LLM for every request or transaction.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Except that that's the easy path to implement.
- bas_sen 1y ago
  You're right that per-request LLM inference is costly, especially at scale. But I think the bet with MCP (Model Coordinated Protocol) isn’t that every interaction will always hit the LLM, it’s that the LLM bootstraps flexible protocol negotiation, and then clients can cache or formalize the result. Think of it more like a just-in-time protocol generator. The LLM defines how to talk, once, and the rest of the interaction can be optimized. Expensive at first, but potentially cheaper than baking in rigid APIs for every use case. Still, lots of unknowns, especially around latency, consistency, and cost.
nzach 1y ago
> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November, but it suddenly blew up in February, 3 months later. Maybe it was because OpenAI announced they would start to support MCP in their tools ? [0] Perhaps I'm being too harsh with the author, but this article definitely gives me vibes of "AI slop". [0] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthropics-standard-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthro...
- yjp20 1y ago
  > Maybe it was because OpenAI announced they would start to support MCP in their tools ? [0] Author here, I assumed this would be the reason too, but the timelines don't really match up. Momentum was already strong by the time that OpenAI adopted it. And it's an educated guess on my part, but that's also probably why they adopted it in the first place. Some sources point to the MCP talk at AI Engineer being the turning point (and the timelines match up), but like with all viral studies the answer is pretty complicated and multi-faceted, rather than having a single cause. > Perhaps I'm being too harsh with the author, but this article definitely gives me vibes of "AI slop". I think it's fine to be harsh! I don't like AI slop either but unfortunately this article was mostly handwritten, so it's just a skill-issue on my part. I'll try to do better next time
nilslice 1y ago
should kill off sdk generators too
neya 1y ago
Obligatory note - if you're a backend developer, you do not need MCP. MCP is just tool/function calling. It has been around for a lot longer now. MCP is only needed if you need something to integrate with the frontend chat applications. If you need to automate something with LLMs, you do not need MCP. Right now, it's just the new cool buzzword to throw around.
- ezekiel68 1y ago
  AI coding tools have been improving/updating like craze over the past six months. Honest question: what are some of the AI Dev tools (I prefer command line) that have leapt ahead recently, with good tool/function calling? Do you (or others) have a clear preference for Claude Code vs aider vs some other alternative? Or is the meta shifting toward the orchestrators like Taskmaster and Puppeteer?
  - neya 1y ago
    I meant to say that MCP is just a wrapper around good old function/tool calling, it's not a new superpower by itself. So, if you're designing a Saas, you don't need to use MCP yourself, you can just use good old function/tool calling. To answer your specific queries, I use the autocomplete in VS Code and I directly chat with ChatGPT-o3 for advanced problems because my background is in Elixir and most models that are hyped up fail badly with Elixir. I'm always a huge fan of o3 as it can solve the most complex problems I throw at it..
    - atonse 1y ago
      Yes, but if I'm implementing "good old function/tool calling" today, why would I not implement it as MCP? I suppose it complicates things? MCP, in addition to being tooling endpoints, would also open up my software to a rapidly growing ecosystem that requires minimal additional work. AND I can still use those same endpoints as tools. What would be the argument for "you don't need MCP when implementing new stuff"?
      - neya 1y ago
ezekiel68 1y ago
I'm inclined to agree with the conclusions of the article. A lot of people make good points here about manual tooling (and I personally prefer this myself) but: Worse Is Better. The MCP way of accessing extra functionality and context will be more accessible to more people, with "recipes" they can easily set up once (or rarely) and thereafter continue to reap the benefits of enhanced LLM operation. There's already a huge arms race in the "orchestrator" space for tools to support MCP plus model routers plus Ollama local plus focused context RAG. I'm pretty sure we will look back at 2025 as a Great Leap Forward (yes, including the casualties implied in that reference) for LLM effectiveness. It's going to be a whole new Eternal September[0] except for LLM usage this time. And a good number of the new "normies" this time are going to be Pointy-Haired Bosses. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
DonHopkins 1y ago
>Instead of serving 200 standalone tools, we serve three meta‑tools and let the LLM discover endpoints at run‑time. >list_api_endpoints lets the model search the catalog (“what can I do with counterparties?”) >get_api_endpoint_schema pulls the JSON‑schema for any route it finds >invoke_api_endpoint executes that route with user‑supplied params >This approach allows the LLM to dynamically discover, learn about, and invoke endpoints as needed, without requiring the entire API schema to be loaded into its context window at once. The LLM will use these tools together to search for, look up, and call endpoints on demand. Congratulation, you have reinvented Microsoft COM, IUnknown, OLE, IDispatch, and ActiveX for LLMS! I'm not being sarcastic or criticizing, it's actually a good idea! Just not new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 I'm also not saying there aren't better approaches, like "NeLLM": taking the NeWS approach to LLMs, where MCP is more like "X-LLM": taking the X-Windows approach to LLMs. Sending JSON data back and forth between a Node based orchestrator and an LLM is one thing, all well and find and traditional, but why not send and evaluate JavaScript code itself? Both Node (or even a secure Node isolate) and the LLM can generate and evaluate JavaScript quite well thank you, and it's a hell of a lot more powerful and concise and extensible that a fixed JSON protocol, for the exact same reason that NeWS is a hell of a lot more powerful and concise and extensible than the fixed X-Windows protocol. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952748 >I agree they should learn from DLLs, gRPC, SOAP, IDL, dCOM, etc. >But they should also learn from how NeWS was better than X-Windows because instead of a fixed protocol, it allowed you to send executable PostScript code that runs locally next to the graphics hardware and input devices, interprets efficient custom network protocols, responds to local input events instantly, implements a responsive user interface while minimizing network traffic. >For the same reason the client-side Google Maps via AJAX of 20 years ago was better than the server-side Xerox PARC Map Viewer via http of 32 years ago. >I felt compelled to write "The X-Windows Disaster" comparing X-Windows and NeWS, and I would hate if 37 years from now, when MCP is as old as X11, I had to write about "The MCP-Token-Windows Disaster", comparing it to a more efficient, elegant, underdog solution that got out worse-is-bettered. It doesn't have to be that way! >The X-Windows Disaster: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >It would be "The World's Second Fully Modular Software Disaster" if we were stuck with MCP for the next 37 years, like we still are to this day with X-Windows.
m3kw9 1y ago
Not when prompt injection and other fairly trivial security issues hasn’t been solved
jlowin 1y ago
FastMCP author here -- (maybe surprisingly) I agree with many of the observations here. FastMCP exists because I found the original spec and SDK confusing and complicated. It continues to exist because it turns out there's great utility in curating an agent-native API, especially when so many great dev tools have adopted this client interface. But the spec is still so young and at such risk of being co-opted by hype (positive and negative). I would invite everyone to participate constructively in improving it. Lastly: this article is plainly AI generated, as `from mcp import tool` is completely hallucinated. Just some food for thought for the "AI should be able to figure out my complex REST API" crowd that seems well represented here.
- ashwinsundar 1y ago
  I would invite everyone to participate constructively in improving it. How do you recommend that I participate? I've written a few MCP servers (based on FastMCP - great work!), and contributed one to Anthropic's list. How do I actually participate in maintaining or improving the core MCP spec? I was under the impression that it was being driven by Anthropic.
  - lightbulbish 1y ago
    IIRC they talk about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2VqaNKstGc&ab_channel=LatentSpace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2VqaNKstGc&ab_channel=Laten... TL;DR If you want to engage with the MCP protocol you can do so here. https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol
- yjp20 1y ago
  (author here) You're right, that snippet was ai-generated and I forgot to action one of my todos to fix that snippet. This was negligent on my part, and I hope you'll forgive me. We're fixing that right now, thank you for the correction!
  - kibibu 1y ago
    Is this response also ai-generated?
prats226 1y ago
The advice anthropic gives in building agents is to ditch the abstractions like agent frameworks etc and just code it yourself. I believe its also applicable to MCP to same degree?
- owebmaster 1y ago
  yes but that could also be a MCP Host and you implement the MCP client logic and can integrate with MCP servers.
matt3210 1y ago
With MCP I can call tools with my own software too without having to use an LLM
prats226 1y ago
One of the major miss right now seems to be in tool calling specs, you specify function names, description, inputs but not outputs. I believe with reasoning models planning things, it would be important to understand output format, descriptions as well?
gregorym 1y ago
Today almost every public MCP server targets B2B workflows like GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, and similar developer or workplace tools. In a recent talk, Andrej Karpathy argued that “LLMs are the new operating system.” If that analogy holds, the only “apps” we've built so far live in the enterprise quadrant of that OS. I expect consumer facing MCP experiences to follow soon. I’m not yet sure what they’ll look like, perhaps games or other interactive content but the infrastructure is falling into place: OpenAI has said ChatGPT will support custom MCP connectors, ElevenLabs’ 11AI already ships with MCP integration, and Claude has added remote MCP support. As those channels reach mainstream users, everyday LLM users will start asking for richer experience and MCP is how developers will deliver them.
Paradigma11 1y ago
So far I am thinking of following uses for MCP: * External tool calls. * Generating status documents and other memories. * Calling a planner/Prolog... to create a plan. * You can wrap another specialized agent into the MCP..... * You can call the tool yourself (at least in VSCode) with #MCPtool for precise tool use or just to generate context.
jp0001 1y ago
So sick of this. LLMs are just a new paradigm on search. Old Google: I don’t know the answer, but here are some links that might help you - with ads. LLMs: I confidently know the answer, but I could be wrong and frequently am. No ads yet, but they are coming.
TZubiri 1y ago
More appropriate title "MCP will eat the world" Also, possible Conflict of Interest, author works at Meta, which develops Llama. And one of MCP's main features is model agnosticism, which benefits contenders to the king model.
andrehacker 1y ago
For those who experienced the short but intense “mashup” mania in the early 2000’s where web applications were supposed to be easily coupled and chained ? Will MCP ecosystems fail for the same reasons (too many changes in APIs, monetization and security barriers ?)
baq 1y ago
Folks at Amazon Alexa are looking at all this and thinking 'what could have been'. Probably. MCP as an Alexa skill but orders of magnitude easier to deploy? Yes, please. With an added bonus of the thing sometimes pseudo-understanding what I said.
SeasonalEnnui 1y ago
Mode Control Panel? I'm not sure about "eating" the world but certainly used worldwide by aircraft. Anecdotally I've noticed a lot of acronyms from science/technology being reused in the context of LLMs, what a curious phenomenon.
- DocTomoe 1y ago
  26^3 is only 17576 potential TLAs. Some collisions are to be expected, especially when you take into account some phrases are more likely to occur than others (such as CP for Control Panel, Certified Professional, Control Protocol, Comprehensive Plan, Child Process ...)
ManuelKiessling 1y ago
A shameless plug, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise: I'm trying to build a Fair-code platform called "MCP as a Service", which allows you to easily launch MCP servers (for example, Playwright MCP connected to a real browser), without the need to think about software or servers, "in the cloud". This way, you can connect to the deployed MCP server from anywhere; for example, from within your n8n AI Agent workflow. The Fair-code model means that there is a "hosted service" offering if you want a maximum of convenience, but you can fully self-host for maximum control. It's still in the "humble beginnings" phase, but I would love to build this into an open alternative to existing, closed-source offerings. See https://mcp-as-a-service.com https://mcp-as-a-service.com for the details. The hosted solution is available, free-of-charge, at https://app.mcp-as-a-service.com https://app.mcp-as-a-service.com.
swyx 1y ago
my attempt at writing this same article back then https://latent.space/p/why-mcp-won https://latent.space/p/why-mcp-won
LAC-Tech 1y ago
I have massive AI fatigue. They're neat I guess, but nothing I've used has had any lasting importance. Can we move on to the next hype cycle rather than remixing this one?
cosbgn 1y ago
The biggest issue I have with MCP is that some companies like notion expect every single user to host and run their own MCP. It would be so much easier for everyone if they would simply host it themselves and give access on MCP.notion.so like stripe and others do.
fmbb 1y ago
How come the LLMs cannot figure out interacting with command line programs and HTTP services with API docs, as humans can? It seems counterproductive that we need to make the whole world adapt to these new super intelligences instead of them just figuring it out.
runlaszlorun 1y ago
It should be added that the company where the blog is hosted makes MCP tools. So a post from a company making MCP tools that MCP is the new Messiah isn't exactly earth shaking.
- troyvit 1y ago
  They need a better PR department. When I read "MCP is eating the world" I took it as, "this is a bad thing." Which, based on the last blog post I read from a knowledgeable person[0], it is. And the more I read this article, I feel like it still is. "The models finally got good enough" is followed by: > Of course, models and agents are still far from perfect—the better models are pretty slow, context sizes are still limited, and performance degrades when more and more context is present. > What’s important is that the models are good enough—once models cross that threshold, the overhead of integrating tool use drops dramatically. MCP just showed up right on time. That's like saying we invented worker ants just in time to help an insane queen. I searched the article for the word "secure" or "security" and quit reading when I couldn't find it. [0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/
  - phonon 1y ago
    It's a riff on this famous article by Marc Andreessen that was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2011.[1] [1] https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/
- tmaly 1y ago
  AI use is not even saturated yet. I would not expect MCP to be eating anything. It might just be a snack for a select few at this point.
enigma101 1y ago
yawn
wunderwuzzi23 1y ago
The ecosystem is still very immature, and there is a lot of hype and unwarranted FOMO. Here a security advisory for a popular Slack MCP server from Anthropic to highlight this: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/security-advisory-anthropic-slack-mcp-server-data-leakage/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/security-advisory-... The fix was to deprecated the source code. But it's still up on npm with 10k+ downloads every week. No CVE issued.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Even MCP is still relying on tool/function calling in LLMs which is just a finetune/trained behaviour with zero guarantees. It relies on training the model so that the probability of outputting the python_call token followed by the correct tool is relatively high. But it's still n<1.
bfeynman 1y ago
MCP is eating whatever the next buzzword is until something else or better comes along. The hype cycles with these ancillary things (RAG etc) is so overblown compared to what actually makes it into practice and production. I would use MCPs as developer. In making AI systems, unless you are in large org (also rare) not even worth doing.
djfivyvusn 1y ago
MCP is extremely limited and imo not at all interesting. What would be interesting is an extension protocol that can modify context on the fly.
butterisgood 1y ago
Anyone see Tron?
fomine3 1y ago
JSON is eating the world... so what? It's just a standard
BLanen 1y ago
It's literally just a mediocre api spec. With creating 0 added value you can wrap your normal http+json "rest" api so it's mcp.

339 points by emschwartz 1y ago

Still confused as to why the super-smart LLM needed humans to create a proxy to every existing protocol. Why couldn't it write client code for all those protocols itself?

owebmaster 1y ago
LLMs hallucinate, MCP restrains the options available.

0x500x79 1y ago

I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed. MCP allows you to bring tools to agents you don't control. It's awesome, but it isn't the right match for every problem. If you believe the hype of X/LinkedIn you would think that MCP everywhere is going to be the solution. Bringing tools to your local Claude client is awesome, but there are still challenges with MCP that need to be solved and like all technology, it isn't applicable universally. Not to mention it's a recipe for burning tokens!

tempodox 1y ago
> … agents you don't control. It's awesome … What have we come to when losing control in software development is called “awesome”.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  WOW talk about quoting out of context.
- 0x500x79 1y ago
  I don't think that the goal of MCP is for software developers. MCP is great for: "I would like Claude Desktop/VSCode/Cursor to know about my JIRA tickets". AFAIK Most of the tools that are being used for AI Coding tools are not delivered through MCP.
  - tempodox 1y ago
    Still, in what world is delegating the stuff you want to do to machines you have no control over a good idea?
- 0x457 1y ago
  Do you get mad at IDE plugins that let you extend software that you don't control?
theOGognf 1y ago
Along with burning tokens, how MCP servers are ran and managed is resource wasteful. Running a whole Docker container just to have some model call a single API? Want to call a small CLI utility, people say to run another Docker container for that Feels like a monolith would be better
- MaxLeiter 1y ago
  Remote MCPs should resolve some of this
- MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
  A "whole Docker container" is not very heavyweight. Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM.
  - jcelerier 1y ago
    > Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM. why does the smallest script take seconds to even start then?
    - stingraycharles 1y ago
      That is not normal. Small scripts should launch in milliseconds, not several seconds.
    - antonvs 1y ago
      Below is a transcript of a "smallest script" which runs in 328 ms total on my machine. And that includes loading an ubuntu OS image, which could be optimized depending on what dependencies the script needs. Of course, if you're invoking it on a remote cluster, there are many reasons it can talk longer, especially if the cluster has to scale to satisfy the request. But all those reasons are nothing to do with containers specifically - it's things like cluster capacity, node provisioning time, container pull time, network latency, etc. If you architect things properly, you can get the number below + network latency even for a remote cluster invocation. $ time docker run ubuntu echo hello world hello world real 0m0.328s user 0m0.011s sys 0m0.010s
pydry 1y ago
It's not the solution to every problem but it's a great substitute for a infrequently used app with mediocre UX and most of the world's apps probably do fall into that category actually.
- 0x500x79 1y ago
  Agree, but I think we should hold those Apps to a higher bar. Chat interfaces are not a replacement for good UX.
  - pydry 1y ago
    Have you tried holding Jira to a higher bar? I don't know how. I'd rather somebody just layered a conversational UX over it.
Aurornis 1y ago
> I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed MCP is pretty cool, but the way every AI influencer pivoted to producing MCP glorification posts at the same time has been groan-inducing. I can usually ignore the hype cycles, but I've been bombarded with so much MCP influencer content in the past few months that I feel exhausted every time I see those three letters.
- 0x500x79 1y ago
  It never fails that if you look at their title it's: VP of XYZ at something.ai as well!
- qsort 1y ago
  It's basically the story of the last 3 years. Can't ignore the technology, but every loser grifter in existence has been on AI full time. On average, the more they are fanatics of it, the less they're able to take advantage of what it actually can do, most often due to an inordinate amount of skill issues unrelated to AI.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    When the crypto bubble burst, the fad chasers had to go somewhere. It is a tale as old as time.
    - roenxi 1y ago
      Which crypto bubble burst? The Bitcoin price still appears to be at all-time highs.
      - Eisenstein 1y ago
        I'm sure your bitcoin are fine, seeing as the entrenched financial institutions and the old money crowd invested in them, their value isn't going to go down; nice to be part of that crowd I am sure. You may want to check in on NFTs, Terra Luna, Celsius, Safe Moon, SQUID, and FTX. I think they might not be at all time highs.
pphysch 1y ago
MCP is a major lifeline for OpenAI and Anthropic. Their only reasonable way to compete with the big vertical AI integrators is if the "community" does all the hard work of integration, hence MCP. After the initial burst of greenfield enthusiasm I suspect it will stagnate as a yet another maintenance burden.
- nsonha 1y ago
  Any kind of open extensions can be framed as "lifeline" but it's also the only way a platform can evolve and actually cater to consumers' need. The alternative is the company somehow knowing how every consumer thinks. It can happen over time just not on any realistic time frame. If it take too long it's not exactly great for the people building on the platform either.
- visarga 1y ago
  Simple - you use MCP agents to update your MCP servers. I made 2 MCPs both 100% vibe coded. Keep the constraints - docs+tests - and you can regenerate the code as needed.
fiatjaf 1y ago
You just said the same thing three times and didn't explain why.

nisegami 1y ago

It isn't hard to see why. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around why MCP was necessary and useful but I tried using* one recently and it's remarkable how big the gap between just being able to reply and being able to interact is. *after forking and modifying it for my use case

dack 1y ago
yeah current AIs are surprisingly good at figuring out which tools to call and how to call them!
prismatix 1y ago
I'm curious to hear which one you forked and found useful? I've looked at the awesome MCP list but was a bit struck by decision paralysis when trying to figure out what to try, so I ended up just not trying any.
- nisegami 1y ago
  We use an outdated on-premise version of Azure DevOps (nee. Team Foundation Server) for our sorry excuse of task management. We also use some horrible plugin for time tracking so our bosses can be sure we're keeping the seat warm for the correct amount of time. I forked [this existing MCP server for azure devops](https://github.com/Tiberriver256/mcp-server-azure-devops https://github.com/Tiberriver256/mcp-server-azure-devops) but I had to make a lot of changes to have it work on our env and I also added some tools for working with that shitty time tracking plugin.
  - prismatix 1y ago
    Ah, got it. Thank you!

ge96 1y ago

Finally the rapping spider makes it big

nickpeterson 1y ago
This is an aqua teen hunger force reference?
mekael 1y ago
I want candy, bubblegum, and taffy…
- tempodox 1y ago
  Doesn't everyone get a unicorn?

dansiemens 1y ago

MCP is currently too difficult to setup and too complicated for consumers to understand. Once somebody big enough figures out distribution and integration a la the App Store, and the market starts to understand MCP integrations as extensions your AI client can orchestrate across (do one thing in App A, another in App B, etc all with a single prompt), it’ll be off to the races.

csomar 1y ago
MCP is too simple actually. You just use one command? I think the problem is that most MCP "servers" do not work. They are either too early/alpha, not well supported, too limited, etc. Everyone is trying to write blog post but not actually do the product development.
- Maxious 1y ago
  Can we split the difference that if one of you say it's simple and one of you say it's too complex, we have reached the juuust right zone.
- svachalek 1y ago
  This is true. Most of the MCP servers I have seen are also some of the worst examples of software I have ever seen. Given the people who are attracted to it, it's likely they're all vibe coded.
- cpursley 1y ago
  Installing even a single command is not tenable for the vast majority of non technical users of software, not even Claude desktop users.

time0ut 1y ago

In some ways MCP is like the next evolution of API over HTTP. We've exposed our APIs as SOAP endpoints. These were not well suited to web based clients, leading to the development of "RESTful" JSON endpoints. As web clients became more complex, GraphQL arose as a solution to some of the problems encountered. Maybe MCP is the next step. I don't mean that MCP will supersede these protocols. My company exposes our endpoints as SOAP, REST, and GraphQL still as they fit different use cases and customer bases. We are piloting an MCP version to see how that goes now. It is fun to work on something new and play with agents to see how they consume our endpoints in this form. I think there is a lot of potential.

v3ss0n 1y ago
Unecessary complication. LLM Can call tools without MCP 100% fine. You don't need a Stateful SSE JSORPC Meshedup server running APIs rebraneded as tools at somewhere on the cloud .
- taude 1y ago
  I think there's going to be a lot of places where you want the middleare that's only exposing a sub-set of apis. and the Ideas that you copy some URL, put it in your LLM Client, and then it magically gets all the tools/endpoints available to you, and you start interacting with it, simplifies the process greatly for a lot of users. No swagger, no http post, body vs params, etc....just play with with your prompt sentance until you get it to do what you want. (edit: sorry, I responded to wrong thread.)
  - v3ss0n 1y ago
    Yeah that but - Why SSE? - Why JsonRPC - Why Statefulness REST based Tool Call Server would work 100% fine. Now auth have to be redone for those specifically. And for users of MCP Tools - they are sending a lot of their information to whatever service they are running - that they have never control of For developer it is not necessary and security nightmare if you use someone's MCP service or run your own. For users , it is a privacy nightmare .
- 1y ago

rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago

I'm still getting the hang of this but Apple's Foundation Models framework [1] (the one recently announced in WWDC) follows this protocol, correct? Does this mean that MCP, as a protocol, can actually take on different forms depending on how platforms/OSes want to allow their users to integrate with LLMs? [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels

neomantra 1y ago
Apple’s Foundation Models support “tool calling”, but that is not MCP. It is a different approach that those interested in MCP should check out, via Swift protocols and macros. Notably I think the structured Swift marshalling is cool. An understated part of WWDC this year.

thm 1y ago

That Google Trends curve does/will look a bit like Smart Contracts.

hk__2 1y ago
> That Google Trends curve does/will look a bit like Smart Contracts. What do you mean? The curve for "Small Contract" is mostly flat compared to MCP: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Smart%20Contract,MCP&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Smart%20Contract,...
spinlock_ 1y ago
I guess more like Blockchain.

ravenstine 1y ago

> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November, but it suddenly blew up in February, 3 months later. Wow, the idea of what's "new" in software has always been really short, but damn, it's becoming questionable whether anything can be considered new these days.

dack 1y ago
yeah it's crazy to think that claude 4 has only been out a month. And the previous iteration 3.7 was launched only in February! but also I think the interesting thing is that people didn't jump on MCP immediately after it launched - it seemed to go almost unnoticed until February. Very unusual for AI tech - I guess it took time for servers to get built, clients to support the protocol, and for the protocol itself to go through a few revisions before people really understood the value.
sidewndr46 1y ago
Yeah, if this was the Javascript ecosystem 3 months would mean the original implementation has been moved to maintenance mode and only gets security updates from here forward. Everyone would need to start migrating to the replacement as soon as possible.

dack 1y ago

MCP still feels so early. It's getting better - we went from "set up `npx` on your system and edit this JSON file in an obscure directory" to "set the name and URL of your MCP server" in claude.ai. But you're right, even knowing how to find a URL for the MCP server is a tall order for most. I wonder what the optimal form factor is. Like what if your AI could /suggest/ connecting with some service? Like your AI is browsing a site and can discover the "official" MCP server (like via llms.txt). It then shows a prompt to the user - "can I access your data via X provider?". you click "yes", then it does the OAuth redirect and can immediately access the necessary tools. Also being able to give specific permissions via the OAuth flow would be really nice.

pabzu 1y ago

Another hyped/clickbait headline about a "new technology" that will "transform everything" written by a company that sells this "new technology".

sylens 1y ago
I just saw some job postings asking for 8+ years experience in MCP
- barbazoo 1y ago
  You need 10+ for senior though.
- olddustytrail 1y ago
  I think you're joking but if not I'd love to see one!
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  >> >> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November woosh!
- saulpw 1y ago
  1 year for a human is like 10 in AI-years.
- layer8 1y ago
  Not a problem for the 15x programmer.
  - kibwen 1y ago
    15x is a rookie multiplier, do you need me to explain how exponential curves work? Within mere months I'll need to start resorting to up-arrow notation to express my value as a developer. And someday I might even start making more money too!
- steve_adams_86 1y ago

furyofantares 1y ago

I have various scripts that I tell claude about in all my CLAUDE.md files and it is successful at using them. Am I missing out on something by not using an MCP? I guess I wouldn't have to paste it into every CLAUDE.md but is there any other noticeable advantage?

ashwinsundar 1y ago
You don't need to aspire to use "MCP", but rather select some MCP servers that will be useful for you. MCP servers basically expose pieces of the web/data that your LLM client has not been trained on. Maybe some private APIs, or internal data that isn't part of training data sets. Real-time data is another good use case. This list has a lot of ideas: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-o... I personally use the Kagi MCP server (allows an LLM client to execute searches against the Kagi search engine), and stochastic thinking/sequential thinking (some alternate thought patterns that help models escape the "valley of optimization" problem). You can't tell Claude.md to "use the Kagi search engine"...it doesn't have an API key to do that. The MCP server basically just exposes the API. You're right, it's a lot less exciting than people make it sound. The future possibilities are where the excitement is at imo. I'm excited about MCP more from a developer side, than from a user side. It really does feel like the first week of mobile apps still. Will it "revolutionize everything"? No, just like mobile apps didn't solve every problem (and made some worse).
- furyofantares 1y ago
  I can see the value if I'm connecting to MCPs other people have written. Or sharing MCPs for a team. As a solo dev though, I don't know of any MCPs that are really valuable to me that aren't more valuable exposed as a commandline tool. I have an "imagine" tool that creates/edits images and audio with various services available to it and guidance on how to use it, I have a "think" command that allows claude or (scripts claude or I write) to use different LLMs for different things and with a library of prompts for specialized tasks, etc. I don't have a kagi command but tbh that sounds useful and I may write a little wrapper for it so I can have it from the terminal too, rather than use an MCP. (None of this is a complaint about MCP btw - just not sure if I'm missing anything that would make it also useful to me right now.) Something I am interested in, is if claude code would do better with access to a language server. I love how claude produces most of it's diffs by string replace, rather than producing a diff and using an "apply model" like cursor does; but it seems it would be better off if it could "go to definition", "find references", and "rename" rather than use grep etc. I do see one project in the list you linked to that seems like it's going for that. Although again I'm not sure if that's better than having a language server cli available.

revskill 1y ago

So MCP is basically: - getTools - executeTool ?

ukuina 1y ago
Shh, that'll blow up the hype bubble.
zingababba 1y ago
Yeah but an LLM is doing it so the outcome is different every time ;)

remram 1y ago

I tried using MCP to run some custom functions from ollama & openwebui. The experience was not great. Doing anything with LLM feels more like arguing than debugging, but this was really surreal: I can see the LLM calling the function with the parameters I requested, but then instead of giving me the returned value, the LLM always pretends it doesn't know the function and tries to guess what the result should be based on its name. The protocol itself is really weird, almost based on standards but not quite. It was made by one vendor to fix one problem. It has the benefit of existing, but I don't know if it is worthy of any praise?

never_inline 1y ago
I mean, LLMs you can run on ollama are usually pretty bad ones.
svachalek 1y ago
I don't know what model you're using through ollama but a lot of people pick up a 4b model and expect it to be ChatGPT when it's like 0.2% of the size. 4b models are mostly toys imo. The latest generation of 8b models are sometimes useful, but often still laughably stupid. 14b starts to have potential, 30b are pretty good. But remember, the hosted frontier models are still gigantic compared to these, and still make stupid mistakes all the time.
csomar 1y ago
Unless you are running DeepSeek/OpenAI/Anthropic models, I suspect your LLM will struggle with the complexity. That being said, except for Puppeteer and usebrowser, every MCP I have tried was complete sh+t. As: doesn't really work and will confuse the hell out of your LLM.

luketheobscure 1y ago

It's interesting how quickly my brain developed an AI detector for written language (this blog post screams ChatGPT). I wonder if it will stay effective, or if LLMs figure out a way around it? Or maybe it's just that this is the new way that technical blog posts are written, sort of how nearly all press releases feel univocal.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kitsune_ 1y ago

It's not.

faxmeyourcode 1y ago

Based on the comments here, a lot of folks are assuming the primary users of mcp are the end users connecting their claude/vscode/etc to whatever saas platform they're working on. While this _is_ a huge benefit and super cool to use, imo the main benefit is for things like giving complex tool access to centralized agents. Where the mcp servers allow you to build agents that have the tools to do a sort of "custom deep research." We have deployed this internally at work where business users are giving it a list of 20 jira tickets and asking it to summarize or classify them based on some fuzzy contextual reasoning found in the description/comments. It will happly run 50+ tool calls poking around in Jira/confluence and respond in a few seconds what would have taken them hours to do manually. The fact that it uses mcp under the hood is completely irrelevant but it makes our job as builders much much easier.

zackify 1y ago
I’ve managed to do the same thing! It’s actually surprising just how powerful 1-5 tools can be if you document it well and the llm knows how to pass arguments from other tool responses you had higher up in the thread
- faxmeyourcode 1y ago
  Yep, we've built some really useful agents with some simple tools (3-5 templated snowflake queries with really good descriptions). The LLM is useful for shaping your question into function params and then interpreting the results based on the context it got from the tool description.
dkdcio 1y ago
Where I struggle conceptually is this works fine without MCP. Write a CLI tool that does the same thing (including external service access) and tell any agentic CLI tool (or Cursor or IDE tool) to use the tool. Much simpler, established security models, etc.
- potatolicious 1y ago
  Sure, and MCP is just a standardized way of exposing tools. This is where I feel MCP is both overhyped (waaaaaaay too much LinkedIn influencer hot air) but also genuinely quite useful. I've done stuff very much like the above with just regular tool calls through the various LLM APIs, but there are tons of disparate frameworks for how to harness up a tool, how they execute, how they are discovered, etc. None of it is rocket science. But the nice thing about having a standard is that it's a well-lit path, but more importantly in the corporate workflow context is that it allows tools to be composed together really easily - often without any coding at all. An analyst who has zero coding experience can type in a prompt, click "add" on some MCP tools, and stand up a whole workflow in a minute or two. That's pretty cool. And yeah, none of it is impossible to implement yourself (nor even very hard!) but standardization has a value in and of itself in terms of lowering barriers to entry.

ramoz 1y ago

9 times out of 10 my Claude Code is using a bash script before I hook up an MCP to it. - less tokens required in context (CLAUDE.md vs CLAUDE.md + MCP bloat per request) - native agent tooling, relying on Bash(my-script params) - less black box (you & the coding agent can read the scripts) MCPs are often wrapping restful apis. Turns out agents can use those just fine.

Karrot_Kream 1y ago
Yeah I wonder just how much MCP is needed when the models seem fine at making REST requests as is, especially if there's an OpenAPI or similar spec available.

klabb3 1y ago

I won’t speak to the technical merits of MCP but I will say this: it doesn’t matter for many use cases, in particular consumer tech. The entire digital consumer economy is built around ownership of the screen real estate, due to a simple reason: ads. Whoever owns the sidebar sets the rules, period. Web2.0 was all about APIs (usually Rest/json) and in hindsight we see a clear distinction on where they’re used: in commercial B2B apps. Conversely, big B2C players shut down the little open they had - Facebook, Gmail removed their XMPP support, and these days Twitter etc even gatekeep content when you’re not signed in or using the app, and aggressively fortify against even basic scraping. When you’re using other clients, you are bypassing their sidebar, meaning their opportunity to deliver ads. So no, your iOS apps and Twitter are not gonna ”open up” their APIs in any way, not through Rest and not through MCP, simply because it goes directly against their incentives. The exceptions are (1) temporary to ride a hype train, and (2) services you pay money for (but even that is wishful and hypothetical).

ukuina 1y ago
This is why CUAs are going to demolish all prior fences.

kloud 1y ago

The reason for MCP is that you get better results with optimized prompts rather than using existing API docstrings. So everybody is going to end up adopting it in some shape or form. It is a general concept, MCP itself is nothing special, it is that just that Anthropic formalized the observation first. Tool call = API call + instructions for LLM So vendors who provide APIs are going to write prompts, add a thin wrapper and out goes MCP. Or you create your own instructions and wrap in MCP to optimize your own workflows.

mooreds 1y ago
For pure OpenAPI APIs, why wouldn't you just update your API docstrings? Or maybe add a new attribute to the OpenAPI spec for LLM prompts? I definitely see the value if you have a non standard API or undocumented API you wanted to expose. And I see value in the resources and prompts parts of MCP, since they can offer clients more functionality that would be hard to put into an API spec.
- kloud 1y ago
  Exactly, having some metadata on OpenAPI and then have a generic openapi-mcp-gateway seems like a useful approach. Or being it a part of a web framework, given routes also expose MCP endpoint. The takeaway is to go beyond the bare minimum and put the effort to optimize the docs/prompts, ideally having some evals in place. For the prompts and resources part of the spec I haven't found much use for those yet. It seems like output of tool calls is enough to get content into the context.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  MCP is winning against OpenAPI because there is no big VC behind openapi.

neuroelectron 1y ago

MCP, in its current form, functions as a fun and profit remote exploit vector, primarily because it exposes AI systems to a wide range of attacks through under-specified security controls, heavy reliance on natural language context, and the ability for untrusted servers to manipulate model behavior. While MCP aims to standardize and simplify tool integration for AI, its half-implemented security features and architectural choices have made it a high-risk protocol, especially when deployed without additional safeguards. A treasure trove of possibilities: OAuth tokens, almost impossible to build alarms for outside of transmission rates (what are you running your own LLM? How about a meta MCP for twice the API calls?) , assumed trusted input, the server can inject malicious instructions via tool descriptions, leading to prompt injection, data exfiltration, or even remote code execution, sometimes without any explicit tool use by the user.

mkagenius 1y ago
Unfortunately, the "protocol" doesn't have any emphasis on security so far, its all a repeat of HTTP -> HTTPS. However I feel the tooling built around MCP has been a lot and makes your work easier. The perfect use today would be using a locally running MCP servers for execution of code[1], manipulation of local files etc. 1. CodeRunner - Generate and run LLM code locally on Apple containers (https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner) (I am one of the authors)
ezekiel68 1y ago
Okay. I guess someone could have said the same thing at the dawn of the microcomputer era, too. Get back to us when the world melts down.
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  I think "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide" doesn't apply to B2B services.

Animats 1y ago

> At Stainless, we’re betting it’s here to stay. By a seller of MCP. The trouble with MCP is that it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction. It's not like the ends negotiate a simple protocol so that later queries are cheap. That's a huge cost increase as traffic increases.

rattray 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "it requires a trip through an LLM for every transaction"? In a normal case of "production software", yeah, you would not want to add an LLM in the middle to make an API call. That's silly – just write the code to make the API call if you can do it deterministically. If you're talking to an LLM in a chat experience, and you want that LLM to go interact with some foreign system (i.e., hit an API), you need _some way_ of teaching the LLM how to make that API call. MCP is one such way, and it's probably the easiest at this point. Doing it through MCP does introduce some latency due to a proxy server, but it doesn't introduce an additional LLM "in the middle". (Disclaimer: I work at Stainless. Note that we actually sell SDKs at Stainless; our MCP generator is free.)
taberiand 1y ago
There is no reason you couldn't design the system to hand off to a simple protocol through an MCP call, it's entirely up to what works in the specific situation. There is nothing in the design that mandates a path through the LLM for every request or transaction.
- Animats 1y ago
  Except that that's the easy path to implement.
bas_sen 1y ago
You're right that per-request LLM inference is costly, especially at scale. But I think the bet with MCP (Model Coordinated Protocol) isn’t that every interaction will always hit the LLM, it’s that the LLM bootstraps flexible protocol negotiation, and then clients can cache or formalize the result. Think of it more like a just-in-time protocol generator. The LLM defines how to talk, once, and the rest of the interaction can be optimized. Expensive at first, but potentially cheaper than baking in rigid APIs for every use case. Still, lots of unknowns, especially around latency, consistency, and cost.

nzach 1y ago

> Heck, even MCP itself isn’t new—the spec was released by Anthropic in November, but it suddenly blew up in February, 3 months later. Maybe it was because OpenAI announced they would start to support MCP in their tools ? [0] Perhaps I'm being too harsh with the author, but this article definitely gives me vibes of "AI slop". [0] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthropics-standard-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthro...

yjp20 1y ago
> Maybe it was because OpenAI announced they would start to support MCP in their tools ? [0] Author here, I assumed this would be the reason too, but the timelines don't really match up. Momentum was already strong by the time that OpenAI adopted it. And it's an educated guess on my part, but that's also probably why they adopted it in the first place. Some sources point to the MCP talk at AI Engineer being the turning point (and the timelines match up), but like with all viral studies the answer is pretty complicated and multi-faceted, rather than having a single cause. > Perhaps I'm being too harsh with the author, but this article definitely gives me vibes of "AI slop". I think it's fine to be harsh! I don't like AI slop either but unfortunately this article was mostly handwritten, so it's just a skill-issue on my part. I'll try to do better next time

nilslice 1y ago

should kill off sdk generators too

neya 1y ago

Obligatory note - if you're a backend developer, you do not need MCP. MCP is just tool/function calling. It has been around for a lot longer now. MCP is only needed if you need something to integrate with the frontend chat applications. If you need to automate something with LLMs, you do not need MCP. Right now, it's just the new cool buzzword to throw around.

ezekiel68 1y ago
AI coding tools have been improving/updating like craze over the past six months. Honest question: what are some of the AI Dev tools (I prefer command line) that have leapt ahead recently, with good tool/function calling? Do you (or others) have a clear preference for Claude Code vs aider vs some other alternative? Or is the meta shifting toward the orchestrators like Taskmaster and Puppeteer?
- neya 1y ago
  I meant to say that MCP is just a wrapper around good old function/tool calling, it's not a new superpower by itself. So, if you're designing a Saas, you don't need to use MCP yourself, you can just use good old function/tool calling. To answer your specific queries, I use the autocomplete in VS Code and I directly chat with ChatGPT-o3 for advanced problems because my background is in Elixir and most models that are hyped up fail badly with Elixir. I'm always a huge fan of o3 as it can solve the most complex problems I throw at it..
  - atonse 1y ago
    Yes, but if I'm implementing "good old function/tool calling" today, why would I not implement it as MCP? I suppose it complicates things? MCP, in addition to being tooling endpoints, would also open up my software to a rapidly growing ecosystem that requires minimal additional work. AND I can still use those same endpoints as tools. What would be the argument for "you don't need MCP when implementing new stuff"?
    - neya 1y ago

ezekiel68 1y ago

I'm inclined to agree with the conclusions of the article. A lot of people make good points here about manual tooling (and I personally prefer this myself) but: Worse Is Better. The MCP way of accessing extra functionality and context will be more accessible to more people, with "recipes" they can easily set up once (or rarely) and thereafter continue to reap the benefits of enhanced LLM operation. There's already a huge arms race in the "orchestrator" space for tools to support MCP plus model routers plus Ollama local plus focused context RAG. I'm pretty sure we will look back at 2025 as a Great Leap Forward (yes, including the casualties implied in that reference) for LLM effectiveness. It's going to be a whole new Eternal September[0] except for LLM usage this time. And a good number of the new "normies" this time are going to be Pointy-Haired Bosses. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

DonHopkins 1y ago

>Instead of serving 200 standalone tools, we serve three meta‑tools and let the LLM discover endpoints at run‑time. >list_api_endpoints lets the model search the catalog (“what can I do with counterparties?”) >get_api_endpoint_schema pulls the JSON‑schema for any route it finds >invoke_api_endpoint executes that route with user‑supplied params >This approach allows the LLM to dynamically discover, learn about, and invoke endpoints as needed, without requiring the entire API schema to be loaded into its context window at once. The LLM will use these tools together to search for, look up, and call endpoints on demand. Congratulation, you have reinvented Microsoft COM, IUnknown, OLE, IDispatch, and ActiveX for LLMS! I'm not being sarcastic or criticizing, it's actually a good idea! Just not new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 I'm also not saying there aren't better approaches, like "NeLLM": taking the NeWS approach to LLMs, where MCP is more like "X-LLM": taking the X-Windows approach to LLMs. Sending JSON data back and forth between a Node based orchestrator and an LLM is one thing, all well and find and traditional, but why not send and evaluate JavaScript code itself? Both Node (or even a secure Node isolate) and the LLM can generate and evaluate JavaScript quite well thank you, and it's a hell of a lot more powerful and concise and extensible that a fixed JSON protocol, for the exact same reason that NeWS is a hell of a lot more powerful and concise and extensible than the fixed X-Windows protocol. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952748 >I agree they should learn from DLLs, gRPC, SOAP, IDL, dCOM, etc. >But they should also learn from how NeWS was better than X-Windows because instead of a fixed protocol, it allowed you to send executable PostScript code that runs locally next to the graphics hardware and input devices, interprets efficient custom network protocols, responds to local input events instantly, implements a responsive user interface while minimizing network traffic. >For the same reason the client-side Google Maps via AJAX of 20 years ago was better than the server-side Xerox PARC Map Viewer via http of 32 years ago. >I felt compelled to write "The X-Windows Disaster" comparing X-Windows and NeWS, and I would hate if 37 years from now, when MCP is as old as X11, I had to write about "The MCP-Token-Windows Disaster", comparing it to a more efficient, elegant, underdog solution that got out worse-is-bettered. It doesn't have to be that way! >The X-Windows Disaster: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >It would be "The World's Second Fully Modular Software Disaster" if we were stuck with MCP for the next 37 years, like we still are to this day with X-Windows.

m3kw9 1y ago

Not when prompt injection and other fairly trivial security issues hasn’t been solved

jlowin 1y ago

FastMCP author here -- (maybe surprisingly) I agree with many of the observations here. FastMCP exists because I found the original spec and SDK confusing and complicated. It continues to exist because it turns out there's great utility in curating an agent-native API, especially when so many great dev tools have adopted this client interface. But the spec is still so young and at such risk of being co-opted by hype (positive and negative). I would invite everyone to participate constructively in improving it. Lastly: this article is plainly AI generated, as `from mcp import tool` is completely hallucinated. Just some food for thought for the "AI should be able to figure out my complex REST API" crowd that seems well represented here.

ashwinsundar 1y ago
I would invite everyone to participate constructively in improving it. How do you recommend that I participate? I've written a few MCP servers (based on FastMCP - great work!), and contributed one to Anthropic's list. How do I actually participate in maintaining or improving the core MCP spec? I was under the impression that it was being driven by Anthropic.
- lightbulbish 1y ago
  IIRC they talk about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2VqaNKstGc&ab_channel=LatentSpace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2VqaNKstGc&ab_channel=Laten... TL;DR If you want to engage with the MCP protocol you can do so here. https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol
yjp20 1y ago
(author here) You're right, that snippet was ai-generated and I forgot to action one of my todos to fix that snippet. This was negligent on my part, and I hope you'll forgive me. We're fixing that right now, thank you for the correction!
- kibibu 1y ago
  Is this response also ai-generated?

prats226 1y ago

The advice anthropic gives in building agents is to ditch the abstractions like agent frameworks etc and just code it yourself. I believe its also applicable to MCP to same degree?

owebmaster 1y ago
yes but that could also be a MCP Host and you implement the MCP client logic and can integrate with MCP servers.

matt3210 1y ago

With MCP I can call tools with my own software too without having to use an LLM

prats226 1y ago

One of the major miss right now seems to be in tool calling specs, you specify function names, description, inputs but not outputs. I believe with reasoning models planning things, it would be important to understand output format, descriptions as well?

gregorym 1y ago

Today almost every public MCP server targets B2B workflows like GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, and similar developer or workplace tools. In a recent talk, Andrej Karpathy argued that “LLMs are the new operating system.” If that analogy holds, the only “apps” we've built so far live in the enterprise quadrant of that OS. I expect consumer facing MCP experiences to follow soon. I’m not yet sure what they’ll look like, perhaps games or other interactive content but the infrastructure is falling into place: OpenAI has said ChatGPT will support custom MCP connectors, ElevenLabs’ 11AI already ships with MCP integration, and Claude has added remote MCP support. As those channels reach mainstream users, everyday LLM users will start asking for richer experience and MCP is how developers will deliver them.

Paradigma11 1y ago

So far I am thinking of following uses for MCP: * External tool calls. * Generating status documents and other memories. * Calling a planner/Prolog... to create a plan. * You can wrap another specialized agent into the MCP..... * You can call the tool yourself (at least in VSCode) with #MCPtool for precise tool use or just to generate context.

jp0001 1y ago

So sick of this. LLMs are just a new paradigm on search. Old Google: I don’t know the answer, but here are some links that might help you - with ads. LLMs: I confidently know the answer, but I could be wrong and frequently am. No ads yet, but they are coming.

TZubiri 1y ago

More appropriate title "MCP will eat the world" Also, possible Conflict of Interest, author works at Meta, which develops Llama. And one of MCP's main features is model agnosticism, which benefits contenders to the king model.

andrehacker 1y ago

For those who experienced the short but intense “mashup” mania in the early 2000’s where web applications were supposed to be easily coupled and chained ? Will MCP ecosystems fail for the same reasons (too many changes in APIs, monetization and security barriers ?)

baq 1y ago

Folks at Amazon Alexa are looking at all this and thinking 'what could have been'. Probably. MCP as an Alexa skill but orders of magnitude easier to deploy? Yes, please. With an added bonus of the thing sometimes pseudo-understanding what I said.

SeasonalEnnui 1y ago

Mode Control Panel? I'm not sure about "eating" the world but certainly used worldwide by aircraft. Anecdotally I've noticed a lot of acronyms from science/technology being reused in the context of LLMs, what a curious phenomenon.

DocTomoe 1y ago
26^3 is only 17576 potential TLAs. Some collisions are to be expected, especially when you take into account some phrases are more likely to occur than others (such as CP for Control Panel, Certified Professional, Control Protocol, Comprehensive Plan, Child Process ...)

ManuelKiessling 1y ago

A shameless plug, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise: I'm trying to build a Fair-code platform called "MCP as a Service", which allows you to easily launch MCP servers (for example, Playwright MCP connected to a real browser), without the need to think about software or servers, "in the cloud". This way, you can connect to the deployed MCP server from anywhere; for example, from within your n8n AI Agent workflow. The Fair-code model means that there is a "hosted service" offering if you want a maximum of convenience, but you can fully self-host for maximum control. It's still in the "humble beginnings" phase, but I would love to build this into an open alternative to existing, closed-source offerings. See https://mcp-as-a-service.com https://mcp-as-a-service.com for the details. The hosted solution is available, free-of-charge, at https://app.mcp-as-a-service.com https://app.mcp-as-a-service.com.

swyx 1y ago

my attempt at writing this same article back then https://latent.space/p/why-mcp-won https://latent.space/p/why-mcp-won

LAC-Tech 1y ago

I have massive AI fatigue. They're neat I guess, but nothing I've used has had any lasting importance. Can we move on to the next hype cycle rather than remixing this one?

cosbgn 1y ago

The biggest issue I have with MCP is that some companies like notion expect every single user to host and run their own MCP. It would be so much easier for everyone if they would simply host it themselves and give access on MCP.notion.so like stripe and others do.

fmbb 1y ago

How come the LLMs cannot figure out interacting with command line programs and HTTP services with API docs, as humans can? It seems counterproductive that we need to make the whole world adapt to these new super intelligences instead of them just figuring it out.

runlaszlorun 1y ago

It should be added that the company where the blog is hosted makes MCP tools. So a post from a company making MCP tools that MCP is the new Messiah isn't exactly earth shaking.

troyvit 1y ago
They need a better PR department. When I read "MCP is eating the world" I took it as, "this is a bad thing." Which, based on the last blog post I read from a knowledgeable person[0], it is. And the more I read this article, I feel like it still is. "The models finally got good enough" is followed by: > Of course, models and agents are still far from perfect—the better models are pretty slow, context sizes are still limited, and performance degrades when more and more context is present. > What’s important is that the models are good enough—once models cross that threshold, the overhead of integrating tool use drops dramatically. MCP just showed up right on time. That's like saying we invented worker ants just in time to help an insane queen. I searched the article for the word "secure" or "security" and quit reading when I couldn't find it. [0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/
- phonon 1y ago
  It's a riff on this famous article by Marc Andreessen that was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2011.[1] [1] https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/
tmaly 1y ago
AI use is not even saturated yet. I would not expect MCP to be eating anything. It might just be a snack for a select few at this point.

enigma101 1y ago

yawn

wunderwuzzi23 1y ago

The ecosystem is still very immature, and there is a lot of hype and unwarranted FOMO. Here a security advisory for a popular Slack MCP server from Anthropic to highlight this: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/security-advisory-anthropic-slack-mcp-server-data-leakage/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/security-advisory-... The fix was to deprecated the source code. But it's still up on npm with 10k+ downloads every week. No CVE issued.

fennecbutt 1y ago

Even MCP is still relying on tool/function calling in LLMs which is just a finetune/trained behaviour with zero guarantees. It relies on training the model so that the probability of outputting the python_call token followed by the correct tool is relatively high. But it's still n<1.

bfeynman 1y ago

MCP is eating whatever the next buzzword is until something else or better comes along. The hype cycles with these ancillary things (RAG etc) is so overblown compared to what actually makes it into practice and production. I would use MCPs as developer. In making AI systems, unless you are in large org (also rare) not even worth doing.

djfivyvusn 1y ago

MCP is extremely limited and imo not at all interesting. What would be interesting is an extension protocol that can modify context on the fly.

butterisgood 1y ago

Anyone see Tron?

fomine3 1y ago

JSON is eating the world... so what? It's just a standard

BLanen 1y ago

It's literally just a mediocre api spec. With creating 0 added value you can wrap your normal http+json "rest" api so it's mcp.