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Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a VFAQ https://hn.algolia.com/?q=what+is+mcp But to save you the click & read: it's OpenAPI for LLMs
OpenAPI for LLMs is such a good way to describe it!
Before the whole "just use OpenAPI" crowd arrives, the point is that LLMs work better with curated context. An OpenAPI server not designed for that will quickly flood an LLM context window.
> But even after a few hours of reading about what MCP is and working through an example , it can be confusing to follow exactly what is happening when and where. What does the LLM do? What does the MCP server do? What does the MCP client do? Where does data flow, and where are choices made? Yeah MCP is the worst documented technology I have ever encountered. I understand APIs for calling LLMs, I understand tool call…
It’s just JSON RPC between a client, one or more servers. The AI agent interaction is not part of what the protocol is designed for except for re-prompting requests made by tools. It has to be AI agnostic.
For tool call workflow: (a) client requests the list of tools from the known servers, then it forwards those (possibly after translating to API calls like OpenAI toolcall API) to any AI agents it wants; when the AI then wants to call a tool (b) it returns a request that needs to be forwarded to the MCP server for handling; and (c) return the result back to the AI.
The spec is actually so simple no SDK is even necessary you could just write a script in anything with an HTTP client library.
I have trouble understanding the level of criticism about MCPs. As I understand it, it's just a tool that allows an LLM to communicate with other tools. People often talk about web APIs, but we should also consider the integration of local tools. For me, the integration is mind-blowing. When I tried the Playwright MCP integration [0][1] a few months ago, I really felt that after giving computers the ability to speak…
Same. To see apps reverse engineered by LLMs with Ghidra [0] blew me away. It CTFed-out hard-coded access tokens and keys from .so's in seconds.
> But even after a few hours of reading about what MCP is and working through an example , it can be confusing to follow exactly what is happening when and where. What does the LLM do? What does the MCP server do? What does the MCP client do? Where does data flow, and where are choices made? Yeah MCP is the worst documented technology I have ever encountered. I understand APIs for calling LLMs, I understand tool call…
MCP is a kitchen sink of anti-patterns. There's no way it's not forgotten in a year, just like Langchain will be
> But even after a few hours of reading about what MCP is and working through an example , it can be confusing to follow exactly what is happening when and where. What does the LLM do? What does the MCP server do? What does the MCP client do? Where does data flow, and where are choices made? Yeah MCP is the worst documented technology I have ever encountered. I understand APIs for calling LLMs, I understand tool call…
I find the opposite after reading the spec. Did you read the spec? I mean the actual spec. not Python API documentation and such. :) It’s just JSON RPC between a client, one or more servers. The AI agent interaction is not part of what the protocol is designed for except for re-prompting requests made by tools. It has to be AI agnostic. For tool call workflow: (a) client requests the list of tools from the known serv…
I've spent so much time clicking through pages and reading and not understanding, but without finding the spec. Thanks so much!
It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude…
Will it be supplanted? Perhaps. But it's not going to die a natural death.
It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude…