Seems like we're just currently in the top-right of this comic https://xkcd.com/2044/
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
11–20 of 366 posts
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#12I don't want to sound like a skeptic, but I see way more people talking about how awesome MCP is rather than people building cool things with it. Reminds me of blockchain hype. MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.
But this whole post is about using MCP sans AI
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#13I don't want to sound like a skeptic, but I see way more people talking about how awesome MCP is rather than people building cool things with it. Reminds me of blockchain hype. MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.
But this whole post is about using MCP sans AI
MCP without AI is just APIs.
MCP is already a useless layer between AIs and APIs, using it when you don't even have GenAI is simply idiotic.
The only redeeming quality of MCP is actually that it has pushed software vendors to expose APIs to users, but just use those directly...
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#14I don’t want to undermine the author’s enthusiasm for the universality of the MCP. But part of me can’t help wondering: isn’t this the idea of APIs in general? Replace MCP with REST and does that really change anything in the article? Or even an Operating System API? POSIX, anyone? Programs? Unix pipes? Yes, MCP is far simpler/universal than any of those things ended up being — but maybe the solution is to build simp…
honestly, yes - but MCP includes a really simple 'reflection' endpoint to list the capabilities of an API, with human readable docs on methods and types. That is something that gRPC and OpenAPI and friends have supported as an optional extension for ages, but it has largely been a toy. MCP makes it central and maybe that makes all the difference.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this whole post is about using MCP sans AI
MCP without AI is just APIs. MCP is already a useless layer between AIs and APIs, using it when you don't even have GenAI is simply idiotic. The only redeeming quality of MCP is actually that it has pushed software vendors to expose APIs to users, but just use those directly...
And that’s the whole point - it’s APIs we did not have. Now app developers are encouraged to have a public, user friendly, fully functional API made for individual use, instead of locking them behind enterprise contracts and crippling usage limits.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#16It's articles like this that tell you we're close to peak hype. There's nothing revolutionary about a text encoding plus a schema. SOAP could do this 20 years ago.
SOAP was worse than horrendous though. I’m sure i’m not the only one hit by ‘well Java SOAP and .net SOAP encode differently so they don’t work together well’ (let alone all the other different implementations each with their own similar differences).
Or how about ‘oh it looks like your client is using SOAP 1.2 but the server is 1.1 and they are incompatible’. That was seriously a thing. Good luck talking to many different servers with different versions.
SOAP wasn’t just bad. It was essentially only useable between same languages and versions. Which is an interesting issue for a layer whose entire purpose was interoperability.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
MCP without AI is just APIs. MCP is already a useless layer between AIs and APIs, using it when you don't even have GenAI is simply idiotic. The only redeeming quality of MCP is actually that it has pushed software vendors to expose APIs to users, but just use those directly...
And that’s the whole point - it’s APIs we did not have. Now app developers are encouraged to have a public, user friendly, fully functional API made for individual use, instead of locking them behind enterprise contracts and crippling usage limits.
MCPs don't change that at all lol
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#18Seems like we're just currently in the top-right of this comic https://xkcd.com/2044/
Someone should write an AI tool that evaluates every top article in hacker News and provides the appropriate XKCD comic as a comment.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#19HTTP: A (Deliberately) Universal Plugin System
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#20I don't want to sound like a skeptic, but I see way more people talking about how awesome MCP is rather than people building cool things with it. Reminds me of blockchain hype. MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.
Regardless of how good a model gets, it can't do much if it doesn't have access to deterministic tools and information about the state of the world. And that's before you take into account security: you can't have a model running arbitrary requests against production, that's psychotic.
I don't have a high opinion of MCP and the hype it's generating is ridicolous, but the problem it supposedly solves is real. If it can work as an excuse to have providers expose an API for their functionality like the article hopes, that's exciting for developers.