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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,
by 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.
- crashabr 1y agoCould you elaborate on why the graph structure is better than embeddings? Is it for a specific use case?
- simiones 1y agoMCP is a detail here. The exact same thing would happen if generate_node and search were exposed as REST endpoints, if Claude Desktop had used REST instead of MCP.
- bboygravity 1y agoIsn't part of the issue that LLM's are relatively bad at REST and json and all that? I remember like 2 years ago there was big hype/revolution around ChatGPT finally being able to return ONLY valid json when you asked it to. So apparently LLMs are not that good at scripting without mistakes. Having said that, I honestly have no clue what MCP looks like or is lol :p
- simiones 1y agoMCP is a form of JSON-RPC over HTTP, so I don't think it has anything to do with that.
- fennecbutt 1y agoMCP is just json. But to your last point: go look it up, have a read through their client/server implementations (for your language of choice). It doesn't actually take that long because the concept is actually rather simple, so I totally recommend it.
- visarga 1y agoMaybe not, I think they trained the model to be especially capable of MCP tool use, and generated data this way. Other formats and systems might be slightly worse, and the whole model would probably not handle such a diversity of tools if all it had was trained on much less diverse API integrations.