MCP is eating the world

I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed.

MCP allows you to bring tools to agents you don't control. It's awesome, but it isn't the right match for every problem. If you believe the hype of X/LinkedIn you would think that MCP everywhere is going to be the solution.

Bringing tools to your local Claude client is awesome, but there are still challenges with MCP that need to be solved and like all technology, it isn't applicable universally.

Not to mention it's a recipe for burning tokens!

> … agents you don't control. It's awesome …

What have we come to when losing control in software development is called “awesome”.

Along with burning tokens, how MCP servers are ran and managed is resource wasteful. Running a whole Docker container just to have some model call a single API? Want to call a small CLI utility, people say to run another Docker container for that

Feels like a monolith would be better

It's not the solution to every problem but it's a great substitute for a infrequently used app with mediocre UX and most of the world's apps probably do fall into that category actually.

WOW talk about quoting out of context.

> I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed

MCP is pretty cool, but the way every AI influencer pivoted to producing MCP glorification posts at the same time has been groan-inducing. I can usually ignore the hype cycles, but I've been bombarded with so much MCP influencer content in the past few months that I feel exhausted every time I see those three letters.

Remote MCPs should resolve some of this

A "whole Docker container" is not very heavyweight. Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM.

It never fails that if you look at their title it's: VP of XYZ at something.ai as well!

I don't think that the goal of MCP is for software developers.

MCP is great for: "I would like Claude Desktop/VSCode/Cursor to know about my JIRA tickets". AFAIK Most of the tools that are being used for AI Coding tools are not delivered through MCP.

Agree, but I think we should hold those Apps to a higher bar. Chat interfaces are not a replacement for good UX.

Have you tried holding Jira to a higher bar? I don't know how. I'd rather somebody just layered a conversational UX over it.

It's basically the story of the last 3 years. Can't ignore the technology, but every loser grifter in existence has been on AI full time. On average, the more they are fanatics of it, the less they're able to take advantage of what it actually can do, most often due to an inordinate amount of skill issues unrelated to AI.

> Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM.

why does the smallest script take seconds to even start then?

I don’t think running these commands in a docker container is the standard way of doing this, I’ve seen “npx” et al being used way more often.

Furthermore, the “docker” part wouldn’t even be the most resource wasteful if you consider the general computational costs of LLMs.

The selling point of MCP servers is that they are composable and plug in into any AI agent. A monolith doesn’t achieve that, unless I’m misunderstanding things.

What I find annoying is that it’s very unpredictable when exactly an LLM will actually invoke an MCP tool function. Different LLM providers’ models behave differently, and even within the same provider different models behave differently.

Eg it’s surprisingly difficult to get an AI agent to actually use a language server to retrieve relevant information about source code, and it’s even more difficult to figure out a prompt for all language server functions that works reliably across all models.

And I guess that’s because of the fuzzy nature of it all.

I’m waiting to see how this all matures, I have the highest expectations of Anthropic with this. OpenAI seems to be doing their own thing (although ChatGPT supposedly will come with MCP support soon). Google’s models appear to be the most eager to actually invoke MCP functions, but they invoke them way too much, in turn causing a lot of context to get wasted / token noise.

That is not normal. Small scripts should launch in milliseconds, not several seconds.

MCP is a major lifeline for OpenAI and Anthropic. Their only reasonable way to compete with the big vertical AI integrators is if the "community" does all the hard work of integration, hence MCP. After the initial burst of greenfield enthusiasm I suspect it will stagnate as a yet another maintenance burden.

Do you get mad at IDE plugins that let you extend software that you don't control?

All influencer content is groan-inducing, but the idea behind MCP is pretty huge: it's the ability to link LLM agent loops into basically arbitrary APIs. It would be weird if it wasn't attracting a lot of attention.

As a developer the hype is over the top for sure, but for the average marketer or influencer I can see how it is warranted.

Now if there is a good way to deal with authentication and authorization piece without agents gone wild that would excite me as a dev a lot more at this point.

If you're talking very specifically about MCP, and not about tool calling more generally, and you're just sort of making the point that the standards aren't fully baked or ready for general use --- that you can't yet reliably plug any API into an agent like Claude Code you don't control, then sure. But MCP is the public face of tool calling, and for tool calling generally that's not a real problem: you can make your own arrangements in your own agents, which are truly simple to write.

I think as a developer, as opposed to an IT integrator or something like that, you should be the most excited about this situation.

Below is a transcript of a "smallest script" which runs in 328 ms total on my machine. And that includes loading an ubuntu OS image, which could be optimized depending on what dependencies the script needs.

Of course, if you're invoking it on a remote cluster, there are many reasons it can talk longer, especially if the cluster has to scale to satisfy the request. But all those reasons are nothing to do with containers specifically - it's things like cluster capacity, node provisioning time, container pull time, network latency, etc. If you architect things properly, you can get the number below + network latency even for a remote cluster invocation.

    $ time docker run ubuntu echo hello world  
    hello world  

    real    0m0.328s  
    user    0m0.011s  
    sys     0m0.010s

You just said the same thing three times and didn't explain why.

Tool-calling is pretty huge, but MCP (a standard for calling a tool over HTTP) is way over-hyped, and neither here nor there really.

When the crypto bubble burst, the fad chasers had to go somewhere. It is a tale as old as time.

MCP means you can get arbitrary tool calling from existing shrink-wrapped agents, like Claude Code, without writing your own agent. It's a big deal.

Any kind of open extensions can be framed as "lifeline" but it's also the only way a platform can evolve and actually cater to consumers' need. The alternative is the company somehow knowing how every consumer thinks. It can happen over time just not on any realistic time frame. If it take too long it's not exactly great for the people building on the platform either.

Simple - you use MCP agents to update your MCP servers. I made 2 MCPs both 100% vibe coded. Keep the constraints - docs+tests - and you can regenerate the code as needed.

Which crypto bubble burst? The Bitcoin price still appears to be at all-time highs.

I'm sure your bitcoin are fine, seeing as the entrenched financial institutions and the old money crowd invested in them, their value isn't going to go down; nice to be part of that crowd I am sure. You may want to check in on NFTs, Terra Luna, Celsius, Safe Moon, SQUID, and FTX. I think they might not be at all time highs.

Still, in what world is delegating the stuff you want to do to machines you have no control over a good idea?

There is bitcoin/crypto currencies, and then there's bullshit and "<boring real world thing> BUT ON THE BLOCKCHAIN".

The former is well-understood and has legitimate use. The latter was a bubble that thankfully mostly burst by now, with the grifters moving on to the next fad (AI).

It really depends whether the parent is on Linux (where your description would be correct), or on MacOS, where running a container involves first booting up a Linux VM under the hood and having it exchange files/network traffic with the host with tons of overhead (not to mention the pile of shit Electron-based Docker Desktop app that feels like it takes as much memory as the Linux VM itself).