5 ms·
It is amazing that folks getting paid several hundred thousand dollars a year...reinvented RPC-over-HTTP/JSON. You too, fellow web developers, are smart enough
by ai_critic 2mo ago
It is amazing that folks getting paid several hundred thousand dollars a year...reinvented RPC-over-HTTP/JSON. You too, fellow web developers, are smart enough to work at Anthropic.
I would love to see a proper engineering post-mortem for how this happened.
- hahahaa 2mo agoI had to double take and say "I coulda dun that!!"
- firasd 2mo agoI wonder if part of it was the bias of how the chat apps work with the streaming maybe they use SSE But I wouldn't discount how uphill it was to probably even argue for something like MCP cause the labs still very scientist-driven and focused on solving everything in token space. The idea that tool use could be super transformative probably wasn't obvious from inside before Claude Code
- desktopentree 2mo agothe deployment targets that got cheap over the last five years are all stateless and a protocol that fights that gets no serverless implementations
- fergie 2mo agoIt does seem like a return to RPC/REST over HTTP (maybe I am missing some subtleties), which makes sense to me since I never really understood the advantage that MCP bestowed.
- pjmlp 2mo agoThey also reinvented CORBA and DCOM, as MCP now supports gRPC as optional protocol. The reason is that these "folks getting paid several hundred thousand dollars a year" are mostly youngsters without any care to learn about computing history, which is why IT is a fashion industry. See HTMX as another example, that is basically ASP.NET Ajax or JSF Ajax.
- ai_critic 2mo agoIf only they could ask for history lessons from an LLM! (To your point...having knocked out CORBA and DCOM, perhaps we may next look forward to SOAP.)
- pjmlp 2mo agoI always have to smile that the whole microservices, isn't much different from "The network is the computer", Taligent, CORBA/DCOM, WebServices, SOA,.... with iPaaS products being another go at BPEL. Maybe Microsoft should bring back Biztalk for agentic workflows.
- bch 2mo agoMaybe Greenspun's Tenth Rule applies to anything "common".
- robertlagrant 2mo agoAs a veteran of JSF - it is similar, but done better, I think. It's only the frontend. Those technologies were more heavyweight, where each component had a lifecycle it went though on each render, and you needed the backend and frontend to support them. HTMX just takes whatever HTML your backend cares to generate, using whatever method it likes, and does the needful with it.
- cpill 2mo agooh no, all of those technologies die on their own merits a long time ago. they were basically over engineered and bloated and horrible to work with.
- ThePhysicist 2mo agoComing up with solutions isn't so difficult, getting everyone behind one is the hard part. Obviously easier if you're one of the two biggest AI companies in the (Western) world.
- jappgar 2mo agoThe funny thing is that Anthropic and its boosters here framed MCP as a brilliant development. It's a terrible protocol with zero value beyond bigtech sponsorship. We're all worse off for it.
- lexicality 2mo agoThey didn't reinvent it, it's literally using JSONRPC. The thing they "invented" was coming up with a loose standard for how to implement your RPC endpoints in a way that the AI was pre-trained to interact with. The actual implementation may have been very janky but the idea itself is sound: If you want to interact with arbitrary services then providing one single protocol (ideally not JSONRPC but hey) with a standard api discovery method and standard starting method call means your super-intelligent machine god can connect to any MCP service with just a URL and figure everything out from there.
- wolttam 2mo agoMCP is invisible to the LLM, or should be, under normal use
- neomantra 2mo agoBy this statement, do you mean that LLMs really just know about "Tool Calling Tokens" or something else?
- wolttam 2mo agoEssentially, MCP is the harness’ wheelhouse, not the model’s
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- JyB 2mo agoNot sure I understand what you mean. MCP servers and methods available do have to be visible to the model in some way so that it can spit out tool calls instructions to be executed by the orchestration layer around it. But you probably meant something else?
- wolttam 2mo agoMCP is the protocol by which the harness can connect with additional tools. The harness does the work of discovering the tools, the model is then fed a description of what tools it has available, with zero awareness of whether those tools are MCP or built into the harness itself (except for by the mcp__ prefix in the tool’s name, which a harness could choose to strip off)
- blitzar 2mo agoIt was a vibe protocol and with the hindsight glasses on it is obvious. Someone should have said to the llm coming up with it -- "that sounds like an API with extra steps ... how about we keep these things (tool descriptions) and get rid of all this irrelevant - this will look good in my promotion meeting - overengineering (everything else)" You are absolutely right is what it would have replied with.
- progbits 2mo agoWhat hindsight, this was obvious from day one.
- lbourdages 2mo agoOpenAPI already exists, you can serve it on an endpoint for tool descriptions. Why did we need MCP again?
- blitzar 2mo agothat would be tokens, vibes and guesses all the way down
- lbourdages 2mo agoAs is the entirety of using an LLM? If you want something deterministic and efficient you get the agent to write a script, verify it, then run it yourself.
- ljm 2mo agoBring back FastCGI, enable the setting in Apache to list a directory, and point the agent to your cgi-bin directory full of all your tools. Calling the bin without any input provides the help text or the interface to the tool. You can probably throw together a passible auth system on top of it that works with the htaccess format. Which is another cgi script but chowned so it can't be called from the outside. If not that, public key crypto - give your agents certificates that are part of the chain of trust. Mint those out of band and give them an insanely short TTL. Fail2ban or something like that to prevent abuse (agent getting handsy with the server gets blocked, credentials revoked). The side benefit is that everybody starts writing perl and awk again. Who needs a JS runtime when you have CGI?
- TZubiri 2mo agoMaybe that's why they are being paid several hundred thousands of dollars. They get the new wave of programmers to implement their proprietary vendor locked protocol instead of industry standard protocols of the commons.
- ljm 2mo agoIt's still too early stage for me. Anthropic needs to mature for a little longer before they're enlightened enough to understand my kafka-based event sourcing model for cross-agent orchestration. Kafka, protobuf, functional domain modelling using F# as a DSL...the whole kit and kaboodle. Only when my AI and its subagents are modelled through a graph of producing agents, consuming agents, and agentic mailboxes, will Claude Code truly shine.
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or an advertisement for your start up.
- MP_1729 2mo agoThe Protocol is from the Linux Foundation
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoIn fact this aspect of "re-inventing and then congratulating oneself for it" has been a factor in software since the dawn of the subject - it is now with AI/ML, becoming far more endemic across a far broader group of people, who ordinarily would not have done software development properly if it weren't for the immense power that comes from glib application of tooling, minus methodology. I have long observed that tooling+methodology is a very distinct skillset in software developers - those who treat both subjects with appropriate governance, excel - those who ignore one for the other, tend to make a mess of it. If you don't have the methods, you will re-invent tools to find those methods. If you don't have tools, you will develop methods sufficient to the creation of those tools. Too many times, folks who have no method of finding existing tools, will instead just build a duplicate tool .. which they will use until they learn the tool-discovery method. I think AI/ML is really turning the tooling+methodology equation into a maelstrom. Apropos proper engineering post-mortem, I would question the impact on AI/ML-derived riches on the drive to turn standard methods into Subscription Services© behind Yet Another Tool™ ..
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoIt used to be partially because building tools is fun. Often more fun than building whatever the company actually needs. But now it’s not that fun. LLMs need to say stuff like “your company sells sparkling water, you should not build and maintain another in-house product board and CRM”, and then stand their ground.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoI'd rather LLM's just do what they are told and not diminish my agency whatsoever. But yes, that is the crux of the problem indeed. Agency is nothing if you don't have methods to turn it into tool-use.