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My main complaint with mcp is that it doesn't compose well with other tools or code. Like if I want to pull 1000 jira tickets and do some custom analysis I can

My main complaint with mcp is that it doesn't compose well with other tools or code. Like if I want to pull 1000 jira tickets and do some custom analysis I can do that with cli or api just fine, but not mcp.

prohobo 6mo ago
Right, that feels like something you'd do with a script and some API calls. MCP is more for a back and forth communication between agent and app/service, or for providing tool/API awareness during other tasks. Like MCP for Jira would let the AI know it can grab tickets from Jira when needed while working on other things. I guess it's more like: the MCP isn't for us - it's for the agent to decide when to use.
- xyzzy123 6mo ago
  I just find that e.g. cli tools scale naturally from tiny use cases (view 1 ticket) to big use cases (view 1000 tickets) and I don't have to have 2 ways of doing things. Where I DO see MCPs getting actual use is when the auth story for something (looking at you slack, gmail, etc) is so gimped out that basically, regular people can't access data via CLI in any sane or reasonable way. You have to do an oauth dance involving app approvals that are specifically designed to create a walled garden of "blessed" integrations. The MCP provider then helpfully pays the integration tax for you (how generous!) while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data. As far as I can tell, that's the _actual_ sweet spot for MCPs. They're sort of a technology of control, providing you limited access to your own data, without letting you do arbitrary compute. I understand this can be considered a feature if you're on the other side of the walled garden, or you're interested in certain kinds of enterprise control. As a programmer however I prefer working in open ecosystems where code isn't restricted because it's inconvenient to someone's business model.
  - hadlock 6mo ago
    >while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data I think this is the key; I want my analysts to be able to access 40% of the database they need to do their job, but not the other 60% parts that would allow them to dump the business-secrets part of the db, and start up business across the street. You can do this to some extent with roles etc but MCP in some ways is the data firewall as your last line of protection/auth.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 6mo ago
    The auth angle is pretty interesting here. I spend a fair amount of time helping nontechnical people set up AI workflows in Claude Cowork and MCP works pretty well for giving them an isolated external system that I can tightly control their workflow guardrails but also interestingly give them the freedom to treat what IS exposed as a generic api automation tool. That combined with skills lets these non technical people string together zapier like workflows in natural language which is absolutely huge for the level of agency and autonomy it awards these people. So I find it quite interesting for the use case of providing auth encapsulated API access to systems that would normally require an engineer to unlock. The story around “wrap this REST API into a controlled variant only for the end users use case and allow them to complete auth challenges in every which way” has been super useful. Some of my mcp servers go through an oauth challenge response, others provide them guidance to navigate to the system and generate an api key and paste it into the server on initial connection.
- michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
  MCPs are for documentation. CLI->API is for interaction.
insin 6mo ago
You can make it compose by also giving the agent the necessary tools to do so. I encountered a similar scenario using Atlassian MCP recently, where someone needed to analyse hundreds of Confluence child pages from the last couple of years which all used the same starter template - I gave the agent a tool to let it call any other tool in batch and expose the results for subsequent tools to use as inputs, rather than dumping it straight into the context (e.g. another tool which gives each page to a sub-agent with a structured output schema and a prompt with extraction instructions, or piping the results into a code execution tool). It turned what would have been hundreds of individual tool calls filling the context with multiple MBs of raw confluence pages, into a couple of calls returning relevant low-hundreds of KBs of JSON the agent could work further with.
- xyzzy123 6mo ago
  Hmm, but you can't write a standard MCP (e.g. batch_tool_call) that calls other MCPs because the protocol doesn't give you a way to know what other MCPs are loaded in the runtime with you or any means to call them? Or have I got that wrong? So I guess you had to modify the agent harness to do this? or I guess you could use... mcp-cli ... ??
  - jmcodes 6mo ago
    I don't maintain this anymore but I experimented with this a while back: https://github.com/jx-codes/lootbox https://github.com/jx-codes/lootbox Essentially you give the agent a way to run code that calls MCP servers, then it can use them like any other API. Nowadays small bash/bun scripts and an MCP gateway proxy gets me the same exact thing. So yeah at some level you do have to build out your own custom functionality.
- losvedir 6mo ago
  But in the context of this discussion, Atlassian has a CLI tool, acli. I'm not quite following why that wouldn't have worked here. As a normal CLI you have all the power you need over it, and the LLM could have used it to fetch all the relevant pages and save to disk, sample a couple to determine the regular format, and then write a script to extract out what they needed, right? Maybe I don't understand the use case you're describing.
somnium_sn 6mo ago
Give the model a REPL and let it compose MCP calls either by using tool calls structured output, doing string processing or piping it to a fast cheap model to provide structured output. This is the same as a CLI. Bash is nothing but a programming language and you can do the same approach by giving the model JavaScript and have it call MCP tools and compose them. If you do that you can even throw in composing it with CLis as well
Twirrim 6mo ago
Weird... I've been happily using Atlassian's MCP for this kind of thing just fine?

prohobo 6mo ago

Right, that feels like something you'd do with a script and some API calls. MCP is more for a back and forth communication between agent and app/service, or for providing tool/API awareness during other tasks. Like MCP for Jira would let the AI know it can grab tickets from Jira when needed while working on other things. I guess it's more like: the MCP isn't for us - it's for the agent to decide when to use.

xyzzy123 6mo ago
I just find that e.g. cli tools scale naturally from tiny use cases (view 1 ticket) to big use cases (view 1000 tickets) and I don't have to have 2 ways of doing things. Where I DO see MCPs getting actual use is when the auth story for something (looking at you slack, gmail, etc) is so gimped out that basically, regular people can't access data via CLI in any sane or reasonable way. You have to do an oauth dance involving app approvals that are specifically designed to create a walled garden of "blessed" integrations. The MCP provider then helpfully pays the integration tax for you (how generous!) while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data. As far as I can tell, that's the _actual_ sweet spot for MCPs. They're sort of a technology of control, providing you limited access to your own data, without letting you do arbitrary compute. I understand this can be considered a feature if you're on the other side of the walled garden, or you're interested in certain kinds of enterprise control. As a programmer however I prefer working in open ecosystems where code isn't restricted because it's inconvenient to someone's business model.
- hadlock 6mo ago
  >while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data I think this is the key; I want my analysts to be able to access 40% of the database they need to do their job, but not the other 60% parts that would allow them to dump the business-secrets part of the db, and start up business across the street. You can do this to some extent with roles etc but MCP in some ways is the data firewall as your last line of protection/auth.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6mo ago
  The auth angle is pretty interesting here. I spend a fair amount of time helping nontechnical people set up AI workflows in Claude Cowork and MCP works pretty well for giving them an isolated external system that I can tightly control their workflow guardrails but also interestingly give them the freedom to treat what IS exposed as a generic api automation tool. That combined with skills lets these non technical people string together zapier like workflows in natural language which is absolutely huge for the level of agency and autonomy it awards these people. So I find it quite interesting for the use case of providing auth encapsulated API access to systems that would normally require an engineer to unlock. The story around “wrap this REST API into a controlled variant only for the end users use case and allow them to complete auth challenges in every which way” has been super useful. Some of my mcp servers go through an oauth challenge response, others provide them guidance to navigate to the system and generate an api key and paste it into the server on initial connection.
michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
MCPs are for documentation. CLI->API is for interaction.

insin 6mo ago

You can make it compose by also giving the agent the necessary tools to do so. I encountered a similar scenario using Atlassian MCP recently, where someone needed to analyse hundreds of Confluence child pages from the last couple of years which all used the same starter template - I gave the agent a tool to let it call any other tool in batch and expose the results for subsequent tools to use as inputs, rather than dumping it straight into the context (e.g. another tool which gives each page to a sub-agent with a structured output schema and a prompt with extraction instructions, or piping the results into a code execution tool). It turned what would have been hundreds of individual tool calls filling the context with multiple MBs of raw confluence pages, into a couple of calls returning relevant low-hundreds of KBs of JSON the agent could work further with.

xyzzy123 6mo ago
Hmm, but you can't write a standard MCP (e.g. batch_tool_call) that calls other MCPs because the protocol doesn't give you a way to know what other MCPs are loaded in the runtime with you or any means to call them? Or have I got that wrong? So I guess you had to modify the agent harness to do this? or I guess you could use... mcp-cli ... ??
- jmcodes 6mo ago
  I don't maintain this anymore but I experimented with this a while back: https://github.com/jx-codes/lootbox https://github.com/jx-codes/lootbox Essentially you give the agent a way to run code that calls MCP servers, then it can use them like any other API. Nowadays small bash/bun scripts and an MCP gateway proxy gets me the same exact thing. So yeah at some level you do have to build out your own custom functionality.
losvedir 6mo ago
But in the context of this discussion, Atlassian has a CLI tool, acli. I'm not quite following why that wouldn't have worked here. As a normal CLI you have all the power you need over it, and the LLM could have used it to fetch all the relevant pages and save to disk, sample a couple to determine the regular format, and then write a script to extract out what they needed, right? Maybe I don't understand the use case you're describing.

somnium_sn 6mo ago

Give the model a REPL and let it compose MCP calls either by using tool calls structured output, doing string processing or piping it to a fast cheap model to provide structured output. This is the same as a CLI. Bash is nothing but a programming language and you can do the same approach by giving the model JavaScript and have it call MCP tools and compose them. If you do that you can even throw in composing it with CLis as well

Twirrim 6mo ago

Weird... I've been happily using Atlassian's MCP for this kind of thing just fine?