[dead]
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
41–50 of 366 posts
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#42Lowering the bar to integrate and communicate is what has historically allowed technology to reach critical mass and enabled adoption. MCP is an evolution in that respect and shouldn’t be disregarded.
We had a non technical team member write an agent to clean up a file share. There are hundreds of programming languages, libraries, and apis that enabled that before MCP but now people don’t even have to think about it. Is it performant no, is it the “best” implementation absolutely not. Did it create enormous value in a novel way that was not possible with the resources, time, technology we had before 100%. And that’s the point.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#43I 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…
MCP is not REST. In your comparison, its more that MCP is a protocol for discovering REST endpoints at runtime and letting users configure what REST endpoints should be used at runtime. Say i'm building a app and I want my users to be able to play spotify songs. Yea, i'll hit the spotify api. But now, say i've launched my app, and I want my users to be able to play a song from sonofm when they hit play. Alright, now…
[dead]
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#44I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
Remember Web 2.0? Remember the semantic web? Remember folksonomies? Mash-ups? The end of information silos? The democratizing power of HTTP APIs?Anyone? Anyone?
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#45I know this is nit-picky and not really relevant to the actual meat of the story, but a toaster (outside of a gag gift or gimmick) cannot run on USB-C since your typical toaster draws ~1kW and USB-C power spec tops out at 240W.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#46Earlier 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.
Do you have an example of a company who previously had an undiscoverable API now offering a MCP-based alternative?
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#47I 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…
In my mind the only thing novel about MCP is requiring the schema is provided as part of the protocol. Like, sure it's convenient that the shape of the requests/response wrappers are all the same, that certainly helps with management using libraries that can wrap dynamic types in static types, but everyone was already doing that with APIs already we just didn't agree on what that envelope's shape should be. BUT, with the requirement that schema be provided with the protocol, and the carrot of AI models seamlessly consuming it, that was enough of an impetus.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#48I 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.
It's incredible for investigating audit logs. Our customers use it daily.
https://blog.runreveal.com/introducing-runreveal-remote-mcp-...
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#49I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
How ironic given the amount of APIs that were locking down access in response to AI training!
Though the general API lockdown was started long before that, and like you, I’m skeptical that this new wave of open access will last if the promise doesn’t live up to the hype.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#50I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
Hype, certainly. But the way I see it, AI agents created incentives for interoperability. Who needs an API when everyone is job secure via being a slow desktop user? Well, your new personal assistant who charges by the Watt hour NEEDS it. Like when the CEO will personally drive to get pizzas for that hackathon because that’s practically free labor, so does everyone want everything connected. For those of us who rode…
Unfortunately, I think we're equally likely to see shortsighted lock-in attempts like this [0] one from Slack.
I tried to find a rebuttal to this article from Slack, but couldn't. I'm on a flight with slow wifi though. If someone from Slack wants to chime in that'd be swell, too.
I've made the argument to CFOs multiple times over the years why we should continue to pay for Slack instead of just using Teams, but y'all are really making that harder and harder.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals...