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MCP is eating the world

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335 points emschwartz | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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0x500x79 ◴[] No.44367530[source]
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!

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theOGognf ◴[] No.44367752[source]
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

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1. stingraycharles ◴[] No.44368296[source]
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.