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Tools: Code Is All You Need

(lucumr.pocoo.org)
313 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 03 Jul 25 10:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.347s | source
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victorbjorklund ◴[03 Jul 25 14:34 UTC] No.44455491[source]▶
I think the GitHub CLI example isn't entirely fair to MCP. Yes, GitHub's CLI is extensively documented online, so of course LLMs will excel at generating code for well-known tools. But MCP shines in different scenarios.

Consider internal company tools or niche APIs with minimal online documentation. Sure, you could dump all the documentation into context for code generation, but that often requires more context than interacting with an MCP tool. More importantly, generated code for unfamiliar APIs is prone to errors so you'd need robust testing and retry mechanisms built in to the process.

With MCP, if the tools are properly designed and receive correct inputs, they work reliably. The LLM doesn't need to figure out API intricacies, authentication flows, or handle edge cases - that's already handled by the MCP server.

So I agree MCP for GitHub is probably overkill but there are many legitimate use cases where pre-built MCP tools make more sense than asking an LLM to reverse-engineer poorly documented or proprietary systems from scratch.

replies(2): >>44455543 #>>44455562 #
1. light_hue_1 ◴[03 Jul 25 14:39 UTC] No.44455543[source]▶
That's handled by the MCP server in the sense of it doesn't do authentication, etc. it provides a simplified view of the world.

If that's what you wanted you could have designed that as your poorly documented internal API differently to begin with. There's zero advantage to MCP in the scenario you describe aside from convincing people that their original API is too hard to use.