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As soon as MCP came out I thought it was over engineered crud and didn’t invest any time in it. I have yet to regret this decision. Same thing with LangChain.
by codemog 7mo ago
As soon as MCP came out I thought it was over engineered crud and didn’t invest any time in it. I have yet to regret this decision. Same thing with LangChain.
This is one key difference between experienced and inexperienced devs; if something looks like crud, it probably is crud. Don’t follow or do something because it’s popular at the time.
- whattheheckheck 7mo agoSo let's say you have a rag llm chat api connected to an enterprises document corpus. Do you not expose an mcp endpoint? Literally every vscode or opencode node gets it for free (a small json snippet in their mcp.json config) If you do auth right
- CharlieDigital 7mo agoNot only editors, but also different runtime contexts like GitHub Agents running in Actions. We can plug in MCP almost anywhere with just a small snippet of JSON and because we're serving it from a server, we get very clear telemetry regardless of tooling and envrionment.
- chatmasta 7mo agoWhat are you using for hosting and deploying the MCP servers? I’d like something low friction for enterprise teams to be able to push their MCP definitions as easily as pushing a Git repo (or ideally, as part of a Git repo, kinda like GitHub pages). It’s obviously not sustainable for every team to host their own MCP servers in their own way. So what’s the best centralized gateway available today, with telemetry and auth and all the goodness espoused in this blog post?
- CharlieDigital 7mo agoWe built our own (may open source eventually). MCP is effectively "just another HTTP REST API"; OAuth and everything. The key parts of the protocol is the communication shape and sequence with the client, which most SDKs abstract for you. The SDKs for MCPs make it very straightforward to do so now and I would recommend experimenting with them. It is as easy to deploy as any REST API.
- whattheheckheck 7mo agoROSA https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/overview-deployment-options/red-hat-openshift.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/overview-depl... it should be part of your app and coordinated in a way that everyone in the enterprise can find all the available mcps. Like backstage or something
- salterisp 7mo ago[dead]
- fartfeatures 7mo agoAll the code I work on now has an MCP interface so that the LLM can debug more easily. I'd argue it is as important as the UI these days. The amount of time it has saved me is unreal. It might be worth investing a very small amount of your time in it to see if it is a good fit. Even a poor protocol can provide useful functionality.
- mlnj 7mo agoYou are right. Although I have been a skeptic of MCPs, it has been an immense help with agents. I do not have an alternative at the moment.
- moralestapia 7mo agoOur workflows must be massively different. I code in 8 languages, regularly, for several open source and industry projects. I use AI a lot nowadays, but have never ever interacted with an MCP server. I have no idea what I'm missing. I am very interested in learning more about what do you use it for.
- winrid 7mo agoMany products provide MCP servers to connect LLMs. For example I can have claude examine things through my ahrefs account without me using the UI etc
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 7mo agoThat's also one of the things that worries me the most. What kind of data is being sent to these random endpoints? What if they to rogue or change their behavior? A static set of tools is safer and more reliable.
- 8note 7mo agomcp is generally a static set of tools, where auth is handled by deterministic code and not exposed to the agent. the agent sees tools as allowed or not by the harness/your mcp config. For the most part, the same company that you're connecting to is providing the mcp, so its not having your data go to random places, but you can also just write your own. its fairly thin wrappers of a bit of code to call the remote service, and a bit of documentation of when/what/why to do so
- ph4rsikal 7mo agoLangChain is not over-engineered; it's not engineered at all. Pure Chaos.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoMuch like how "literally" doesn't literally mean "literally" anymore, "over-engineered" in most cases doesn't mean "too much engineering happened" but "wrong design/abstractions", which of course translates to "designs/abstractions I don't like".
- fartfeatures 7mo agoUnder-engineered is a much better term.
- rdedev 7mo agoI wish job openings for anything LLM related would stop asking for experience with langchain
- kubanczyk 7mo ago> if something looks like crud, it probably is crud Yes, technically, but you've probably meant cruft here.
- tptacek 7mo agoI still don't really understand what LangChain even is.
- jamesrom 7mo agoWhat part of MCP do you think is over-engineered? This is quite literally the opposite opinion I and many others had when first exploring MCP. It's so _obviously_ simple, which is why it gained traction in the first place.
- gtirloni 7mo agoWhat are you investing time in instead?
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]