9 ms·

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

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.
  - what-the-grump 1y ago
    xkcd 927, every single time
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- rictic 1y ago
  Yes, MCP adds no new fundamental capabilities. What it does is solve an N x M problem, where to hook up a given tool to a given LLM scaffold you have to write specific integration code for that combination of scaffold and tool. With MCP that's decoupled, the tool and the software speak a common protocol, and it's one line of configuration to hook the tool up to the LLM. Makes it easy to mix and match, reuse code, etc.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    tool --help man tool
- chime 1y ago
tptacek 1y ago
I'm doing the same thing now (with Slack as a medium of interaction with the agent) --- but not with MCP, just with straight up tool call APIs.
- rattray 1y ago
  How many tools does your agent have access to? At Stainless we use https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front to make it easy for anyone on the team (including non-technical folks) to OAuth into a pretty wide variety of tools for their AI chats, using their creds. All proxied on infra we control. Even our read replica postgres DB is available, just push a button.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Just 5 or 6. I'm just using the OpenAI tool call API for it; I own the agent (more people should!) so MCP doesn't do much for me.
    - fb03 1y ago
      This. If you are running your agent loop, MCP does nothing. MCP is an inter-process (or inter-system) communication standard, and it's extremely successful at that. But some people try to shoehorn it into a single system where it makes for a cumbersome fit, like having your service talk to itself via MCP as a subprocess just for the sake of "hey, we have MCP". If you own your loop AND your business logic lives in the same codebase/process as your agent loop, you don't need MCP at all, period. Just use a good agent framework like PydanticAI, define your tools (and have your framework forward your docstrings/arguments into the context) and you're golden!
      - easypancakes 1y ago
        Hi! I am a bit lost in all of this. How do you create your own agent and run your own loop? I've looked at PydanticAI but don't get it. Would you please give me an example? Thanks!
ramesh31 1y ago
I've found it to be amazing purely as a new form factor for software delivery. There's a middle ground so common in enterprise where there's a definite need for some kind of custom solution to something, but not enough scale or resourcing to justify building out a whole front end UI, setting up servers, domains, deploying, and maintaining it. Now you can just write a little MCP tool that does exactly what the non-technical end user needs and deliver it as a locally installed "plugin" to whatever agentic tooling they are using already (Claude Desktop, etc). And using Smithery, you don't even have to worry about the old updating concerns of desktop software either; users get the latest version of your tooling every time they start their host application.
rcarmo 1y ago
As someone who does both, I have to say that the only reason I am writing MCP stuff is that all the user-side tools seem to support it. And the moment we, as an industry, settle on something sane, I will rip out the whole thing and adopt that, because MCP brings _nothing_ to the table that I could not do with a "proper" API using completely standard tooling. Then again, I have run the whole gamut since the EDI and Enterprise JavaBeans era, XML-RPC, etc. - the works. Our industry loves creating new API surfaces and semantics without a) properly designing them from the start and b) aiming for a level of re-use that is neither pathological nor wasteful of developer time, so I'm used to people from "new fields of computing" ignoring established wisdom and rolling their own API "conventions". But, again, the instant something less contrived and more integratable comes along, I will gleefully rm -rf the entire thing and move over, and many people in the enterprise field feel exactly the same - we've spent decades builting API management solutions with proper controls, and MCP bodges all of that up.
- alfalfasprout 1y ago
  > And the moment we, as an industry, settle on something sane, I will rip out the whole thing and adopt that, because MCP brings _nothing_ to the table that I could not do with a "proper" API using completely standard tooling. 100%. I suppose I understand MCP for user-side tooling but people seem to be reinventing the wheel because they don't understand REST. making REST requests with a well defined schema from an LLM is not all that hard.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    I don't even mind it existing, it's just the way it's presented/documented/talked about like it's some special novel important concept that baffles me, and I think makes it more confusing for developer newcomers (but fine or maybe even helpful for not-particularly-technical but AI-keen/'power' users).
    - visarga 1y ago
      MCP is really a great leap because LLMs orchestrate across a collection of tools instead of running a scripted flow. The most obvious example is deep research, where the LLM sends initial queries, reads, then generates new queries and loops until it finds what it needs. This dynamic orchestration of the search tool is almost impossible to do in a scripted way. And it shows where the MCP value is - you just write simple tools, and AI handles the contextual application. You just make the backend, the front end is the LLM with human in the loop. I made an MCP with 2 tools - generate_node and search, and with it Claude Desktop app can create a knowledge graph complete with links and everything. It scales unbounded by context size but is read/write and smarter than RAG because it uses graph structure not just embeddings. I just made the reading and writing tools, the magic of writing the nodes, linking them up, searching and analyzing them is due to AI. And again, Claude can be very efficient at wielding these tools with zero effort on my part. That is the value of MCP.
pulkitsh1234 1y ago
curious which MCP servers are you using for accessing JIRA/Confluence ? So far haven't found any good/official ones.
- faxmeyourcode 1y ago
  https://github.com/sooperset/mcp-atlassian https://github.com/sooperset/mcp-atlassian
  - wstrange 1y ago
    Looking at the demo I can see project managers going wild with this. And not in a good way.
    - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
      Lol, we are keeping READ_ONLY_MODE on for now
- Maxious 1y ago
  There is an official one now but YMMV how/if your particular application can use it https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
I suppose it shouldn't bother me that the people doing that are 'business users' but I have to wonder if adults these days are so illiterate that they can't read through 20 jira tickets and categorize them in less than an hour.
- christophilus 1y ago
  If they can automate it, then they can spend that time doing something more useful, like researching Jira alternatives.
- cube00 1y ago
  This leaves more time to spend arguing with the chatbot about miscategorized tickets; the chatbot exclaiming "you're right, I'll do better next time" and then making the same mistake tomorrow.
  - burstoflight 1y ago
    Overeager intern ...
- plausibilitious 1y ago
  More concerning is people thinking that the document you output is the outcome, when the mental models and the domain understanding are what we ought to strive for. Organizations are primarily systems for learning. Substituting machine learning (from a vendor) for human learning inside the team is a bad strategy.

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.
- what-the-grump 1y ago
  xkcd 927, every single time
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
rictic 1y ago
Yes, MCP adds no new fundamental capabilities. What it does is solve an N x M problem, where to hook up a given tool to a given LLM scaffold you have to write specific integration code for that combination of scaffold and tool. With MCP that's decoupled, the tool and the software speak a common protocol, and it's one line of configuration to hook the tool up to the LLM. Makes it easy to mix and match, reuse code, etc.
- OJFord 1y ago
  tool --help man tool
chime 1y ago

tptacek 1y ago

I'm doing the same thing now (with Slack as a medium of interaction with the agent) --- but not with MCP, just with straight up tool call APIs.

rattray 1y ago
How many tools does your agent have access to? At Stainless we use https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front to make it easy for anyone on the team (including non-technical folks) to OAuth into a pretty wide variety of tools for their AI chats, using their creds. All proxied on infra we control. Even our read replica postgres DB is available, just push a button.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Just 5 or 6. I'm just using the OpenAI tool call API for it; I own the agent (more people should!) so MCP doesn't do much for me.
  - fb03 1y ago
    This. If you are running your agent loop, MCP does nothing. MCP is an inter-process (or inter-system) communication standard, and it's extremely successful at that. But some people try to shoehorn it into a single system where it makes for a cumbersome fit, like having your service talk to itself via MCP as a subprocess just for the sake of "hey, we have MCP". If you own your loop AND your business logic lives in the same codebase/process as your agent loop, you don't need MCP at all, period. Just use a good agent framework like PydanticAI, define your tools (and have your framework forward your docstrings/arguments into the context) and you're golden!
    - easypancakes 1y ago
      Hi! I am a bit lost in all of this. How do you create your own agent and run your own loop? I've looked at PydanticAI but don't get it. Would you please give me an example? Thanks!

ramesh31 1y ago

I've found it to be amazing purely as a new form factor for software delivery. There's a middle ground so common in enterprise where there's a definite need for some kind of custom solution to something, but not enough scale or resourcing to justify building out a whole front end UI, setting up servers, domains, deploying, and maintaining it. Now you can just write a little MCP tool that does exactly what the non-technical end user needs and deliver it as a locally installed "plugin" to whatever agentic tooling they are using already (Claude Desktop, etc). And using Smithery, you don't even have to worry about the old updating concerns of desktop software either; users get the latest version of your tooling every time they start their host application.

rcarmo 1y ago

As someone who does both, I have to say that the only reason I am writing MCP stuff is that all the user-side tools seem to support it. And the moment we, as an industry, settle on something sane, I will rip out the whole thing and adopt that, because MCP brings _nothing_ to the table that I could not do with a "proper" API using completely standard tooling. Then again, I have run the whole gamut since the EDI and Enterprise JavaBeans era, XML-RPC, etc. - the works. Our industry loves creating new API surfaces and semantics without a) properly designing them from the start and b) aiming for a level of re-use that is neither pathological nor wasteful of developer time, so I'm used to people from "new fields of computing" ignoring established wisdom and rolling their own API "conventions". But, again, the instant something less contrived and more integratable comes along, I will gleefully rm -rf the entire thing and move over, and many people in the enterprise field feel exactly the same - we've spent decades builting API management solutions with proper controls, and MCP bodges all of that up.

alfalfasprout 1y ago
> And the moment we, as an industry, settle on something sane, I will rip out the whole thing and adopt that, because MCP brings _nothing_ to the table that I could not do with a "proper" API using completely standard tooling. 100%. I suppose I understand MCP for user-side tooling but people seem to be reinventing the wheel because they don't understand REST. making REST requests with a well defined schema from an LLM is not all that hard.
- OJFord 1y ago
  I don't even mind it existing, it's just the way it's presented/documented/talked about like it's some special novel important concept that baffles me, and I think makes it more confusing for developer newcomers (but fine or maybe even helpful for not-particularly-technical but AI-keen/'power' users).
  - visarga 1y ago
    MCP is really a great leap because LLMs orchestrate across a collection of tools instead of running a scripted flow. The most obvious example is deep research, where the LLM sends initial queries, reads, then generates new queries and loops until it finds what it needs. This dynamic orchestration of the search tool is almost impossible to do in a scripted way. And it shows where the MCP value is - you just write simple tools, and AI handles the contextual application. You just make the backend, the front end is the LLM with human in the loop. I made an MCP with 2 tools - generate_node and search, and with it Claude Desktop app can create a knowledge graph complete with links and everything. It scales unbounded by context size but is read/write and smarter than RAG because it uses graph structure not just embeddings. I just made the reading and writing tools, the magic of writing the nodes, linking them up, searching and analyzing them is due to AI. And again, Claude can be very efficient at wielding these tools with zero effort on my part. That is the value of MCP.

pulkitsh1234 1y ago

curious which MCP servers are you using for accessing JIRA/Confluence ? So far haven't found any good/official ones.

faxmeyourcode 1y ago
https://github.com/sooperset/mcp-atlassian https://github.com/sooperset/mcp-atlassian
- wstrange 1y ago
  Looking at the demo I can see project managers going wild with this. And not in a good way.
  - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
    Lol, we are keeping READ_ONLY_MODE on for now
Maxious 1y ago
There is an official one now but YMMV how/if your particular application can use it https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server https://www.atlassian.com/platform/remote-mcp-server

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

I suppose it shouldn't bother me that the people doing that are 'business users' but I have to wonder if adults these days are so illiterate that they can't read through 20 jira tickets and categorize them in less than an hour.

christophilus 1y ago
If they can automate it, then they can spend that time doing something more useful, like researching Jira alternatives.
cube00 1y ago
This leaves more time to spend arguing with the chatbot about miscategorized tickets; the chatbot exclaiming "you're right, I'll do better next time" and then making the same mistake tomorrow.
- burstoflight 1y ago
  Overeager intern ...
plausibilitious 1y ago
More concerning is people thinking that the document you output is the outcome, when the mental models and the domain understanding are what we ought to strive for. Organizations are primarily systems for learning. Substituting machine learning (from a vendor) for human learning inside the team is a bad strategy.