So does that mean it’s good to integrate mcp with agentic ai
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
151–160 of 366 posts
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sounds sort of like an innovator's dilemma response. New technology appears and the response is gatekeeping and building walls rather than adaptation.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#153I 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…
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Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#154Can someone link to this supposed toaster with DP-alt mode? That supposedly runs on 240W? (Max PD power)
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#155... MCP is almost literally just a JSON schema and a "yo, this stuff exists" for AI. It is great to have it standardised and we're all very thankful not to be using XML but there just isn't that much there. MCP is fulfilling the promise of AI agents being able to do their own thing. None of this is unintended, unforeseen or particularly dependent on the existence of MCP. It is exciting, the fact that AI has this capa…
XML actually works better with LLMs than JSON.
Why?
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#156I 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…
The main difference between MCP and REST is `list-tools`. REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that, including "read it from our docs site", HATEOAS, OAS running on an endpoint as part of the API. MCP has a single way of listing endpoints.
> The main difference between MCP and REST is `list-tools`.
> REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that
You think nobody's ever going to publish a slight different standard to Anthropic's MCP that is also primarily intended for LLMs?
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the only thing novel about MCP is requiring the schema is provided as part of the protocol You mean, like OpenAPI, gRPC, SOAP, and CORBA?
You can’t connect to a gRPC endpoint and ask to download the client protobuf, but yes.
It's not enabled by default, but you can --- gRPC Reflection:
* https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/documentation/...
* https://grpc.io/docs/guides/reflection/
You can then use generic tools like grpc_cli or grpcurl to list available services and methods, and call them.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes. Pieces of all of those things surround us now. And where we are wrt locking and interop is far beyond where we were when each of those fads happened. Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. The benefits are too high for companies to allow vendors to lock the data away from them.
I know we're all just soaked by a wave of hype right now but I think MCP will go the way of other "but it works" tech, like zip files, RSS and shell scripts.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#159The author is missing the bit that the LLM provides: automatically mapping input parameters to things the user wants to do, and responses to the way the UI displays them.
Take out the LLM and you're not that far away from existing protocols and standards. It's not plugging your app into any old MCP and it just works (like the USB-C example).
But, it is a good point that the hype is getting a lot of apps and services to offer APIs in a universal protocol. That helps.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your point. Some of those things were buzzwords, some were impossible dreams, some changed the way the web works completely. Are you just saying that the future is unknown?
No. What they are saying is best said with a quote from Battlestar Galactica: > All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. ”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier.…
I'm older and would like a discount please. The "this time it's different" energy is because assuming a human can interact with the system, and that vision models can drive a gui, who cares if there's an actual API, just have the AI interact with the system as if it was coming in as a human.