I 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.
MCP seems to be about giving you access to your own data. Your Slack conversations, your Jira tickets, your calendar appointments. Those wouldn't go into AI training datasets anyway, locked down APIs or not.
The APIs of old were about giving you programmatic access to publicly available information. Public tweets, public Reddit posts, that sort of thing. That's the kind of data AI companies want for training, and you aren't getting it through MCP.
I 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.
> 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.
how would ingesting Ableton Live's documentation help Claude create tunes in it for instance?
the whole point of the article is that it doesn't need to be an LLM, MCP is just a standard way to expose tools to things that use tools. LLMs can use tools, but so can humans.
Part of the reason AI agents and MCP work is because AI can programmatically at runtime determine what plug-ins to use. Without the AI part, how does the host app know when to call a MCP server function?
same as any other api function call in an app - because an app developer programmed it to call that function.
I love the article & the protocol.
However, MCP reminded me (somewhat) of microservices & SOA. Are we creating failure vectors nightmare? Or, is it, because of agents, we can gracefully increase reliability?
While reading this, the old ARexx (Amiga Rexx) popped into my head. It was a scripting language that in itself wasn't very noteworthy. However, it also made it easy for applications to expose functionality through an ARexx port. And again, offering up an API itself isn't noteworthy either. But it shipped by default in the system and if an application wanted to open itself up for scripting, ARexx was the natural choic…
IBM was big on Rexx when OS/2 2.x was released in ~1993.
"IBM also once engaged in a technology transfer with Commodore, licensing Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above, in exchange for the REXX scripting language. This means that OS/2 may have some code that was not written by IBM, which can therefore prevent the OS from being re-announced as open-sourced in the future. On the other hand, IBM donated Object REXX for Windows and OS/2 to the Open Object REXX project maintained by the REXX Language Association on SourceForge."
> The protocol doesn't judge your life choices. This brings me to something I discovered about MCP (Model Context Protocol) while trying to make my calendar app order takeout. Stay with me here.
What was that character in “South Park” that has a hand puppet? (White noise, flatline sound)
Yes, I'm old. Old enough to remember the MCP when he was just a chess program! He started small, and he'll end small!
Sounds like programming! What happened to low code/no code? I AM old, retired in fact. IT has more "middleware" than the library of congress and mainframes still exist. But I will dig around, because I'm still curious. Carry on. LOL
Erm, hey Mac, he’s quoting “TRON” -and getting downvoted by peeps who don’t remember or are from alien cultures that don’t incorporate it.
I 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…
I joked with people in IRC that it took LLMs to bring answer engines into the terminal
While reading this, the old ARexx (Amiga Rexx) popped into my head. It was a scripting language that in itself wasn't very noteworthy. However, it also made it easy for applications to expose functionality through an ARexx port. And again, offering up an API itself isn't noteworthy either. But it shipped by default in the system and if an application wanted to open itself up for scripting, ARexx was the natural choic…
IBM was big on Rexx when OS/2 2.x was released in ~1993. "IBM also once engaged in a technology transfer with Commodore, licensing Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above, in exchange for the REXX scripting language. This means that OS/2 may have some code that was not written by IBM, which can therefore prevent the OS from being re-announced as open-sourced in the future. On the other hand, IBM donated Object REXX f…
I’m not reading thru all that, but believe me when I say the ground truth is that IBM developed REXX on its mainframes and a genius guy from that world (poor bstrd) recreated it on Amiga as a third-party product called ARexx that was, in turn, adopted and promoted by CBM Dev Relations. One of the things the fake frenching innovation team in charge of Apple for a few years did was go down in the basement where they had an Amiga in various forms of dissection and transplanted ARexx out of it, mixed with HyperCard’s vocab (which they also didn’t invent) and announced to the World their great invention: AppleScript. But I digress. Here in the (dystopian) Future, some Apple operating systems are just now gaining the kind of power that ARexx had, because these types of systems require the cooperation of the developers and they had little incentive to “donate” functions to the system just to gain integration with Siri/Shortcuts, but they can get fired/bankrupted for not doing it to integrate with Apple Intelligence (I know, I hate that identifier too). ARexx could not be ported to MacOS back in the day because it would have had to have been championed by Apple Developer Relations (Guy Kawasaki & Co —did I just wreck the “Hackers” movie reference?) and, even/especially in the 80s, they wouldn’t have approved a tech that “competed” with AppleScript. Microsoft didn’t jump on this because it descends from DEC tech (under the direction of the Cutler) which had nothing like REXX.