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What if you don't need MCP at all?

(mariozechner.at)
237 points jdkee | 2 comments | 16 Nov 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.487s | source
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whoknowsidont ◴[16 Nov 25 21:37 UTC] No.45948637[source]▶
MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense.

"What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!"

LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

Not only do you not need MCP, but you should actively avoid using it.

Stick with tried and proven API standards that are actually observable and secure and let your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints.

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cyanydeez ◴[16 Nov 25 21:51 UTC] No.45948748[source]▶
probably easier to just tell people: You want MCP? Add a "description" field to your rest API that describes how to call it.

That's all it's doing. Just plain ole context pollution. World could be better served by continuing to build out the APIs that exist.

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1. jes5199 ◴[16 Nov 25 22:31 UTC] No.45949068[source]▶
yesss, and OpenAI tried this first when they were going to do a “GPT store”. But REST APIs tend to be complicated because they’re supporting apps. MCP, when it works, is very simple functions

in practice it seems like command line tools work better than either of those approaches

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2. CuriouslyC ◴[16 Nov 25 23:39 UTC] No.45949514[source]▶
Command line tools are my preference just because they're also very useful to humans. I think providing agents function libraries and letting them compose in a repl works about as well but is higher friction due env management.