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MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#221

Post by vaxman »

billmcneale wrote: post #122
vinkelhake wrote: post #52

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…

Microsoft introduced this in Windows in 1993, it's called COM and is still in (heavy) use today. It basically powers all inter communication in Windows.

Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#222

Post by ramoz »

qsort wrote: post #20
jampa wrote: post #10

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.

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 ca…

> Regardless of how good a model gets

I don't think this is true.

My Claude Code can:

- open a browser, debug a ui, or navigate to any website

- write a script to interact with any type of accessible api

All without MCP.

Within a year I expect there to be legitimate "computer use" agents. I expect agent sdks to take over llm apis as defacto abstractions for models, and MCP will have limited use isolated to certain platforms - but with that caveat that an MCP-equipped agent performs worse than a native computer-use agent.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#223

Post by billmcneale »

vaxman wrote: post #221
billmcneale wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft introduced this in Windows in 1993, it's called COM and is still in (heavy) use today. It basically powers all inter communication in Windows.

Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though

COM is exactly what OP was talking about.

Apps can expose endpoints that can be listed, and external processes can call these endpoints.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#224

Post by recursivedoubts »

NomDePlum wrote: post #187
renerick wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H in HATEOAS stands for "hypermedia". Hypermedia is a type of document that includes hypermedia controls, which are presented by the hypermedia client to a user for interaction. It's the user who makes decision what controls to interact with. For example, when I'm writing this comment, HN server gave a hypermedia document, which contains your comment, a textarea input and a button to submit my reply, and me, the huma…

So that's not my understanding. Hypermedia, as I understand it, are embedded links in responses that present possible forward actions. They are structured in a way that machine program could parse and use. I don't believe it requires human-in-the-loop, although that is of course possible.

HTML is a hypermedia format, the most widely used, and it's designed mainly for human consumption. Machines parsing and using something is too broad an idea to engage with meaningfully: browsers parse HTML and do something with it: they present it to humans to select actions (i.e. hypermedia controls) to perform.

Your understanding is incorrect, the links above will explain it. HATEOAS (and REST, which is a superset of HATEOAS) requires a consumer to have agency to make any sense (see https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...)

MCP could profitably explore adding hypermedia controls to the system, would be interesting to see if agentic MCP APIs are able to self-organize:

https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1938250320817361063

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#225

Post by bigiain »

stavros wrote: post #164
phh wrote: post #22

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 haven't seen an app that didn't have an API create one via MCP. The only MCP servers I've seen were for things that I could already access programmatically.

I am pondering if I should do this.

If I have a app who's backend needs to connect to, say, a CRM platform - I wonder if instead of writing APIs to connect to Dynamics or Salesforce or Hubspot specifically, if there's benefit in abstracting a CRM interface with an MCP so that switching CRM providers later (or adding additional CRMs) becomes easier?

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#227

Post by stavros »

bigiain wrote: post #225
stavros wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen an app that didn't have an API create one via MCP. The only MCP servers I've seen were for things that I could already access programmatically.

I am pondering if I should do this. If I have a app who's backend needs to connect to, say, a CRM platform - I wonder if instead of writing APIs to connect to Dynamics or Salesforce or Hubspot specifically, if there's benefit in abstracting a CRM interface with an MCP so that switching CRM providers later (or adding additional CRMs) becomes easier?

One of us doesn't understand MCP well enough, and it might very well be me, but how can MCP be used without an LLM? Most of the structure is in human language.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#228

Post by bigiain »

apgwoz wrote: post #53
bitwize wrote: post #44

Earlier 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?

I think we found a new backronym for MCP: Mashup Context Protocol. (The mashup hype was incredible, btw. Some of the most ridiculous web contraptions ever.)

And some of the most ridiculous songs. I remember (vaguely) a Bootie show at DNA Lounge back in the early 2000s that was entirely mashups. It was hilarious. Lady Gaga mashes up with Eurythmics, Coldplay and Metallica, Robert Palmer and Radiohead.

(I hereby claim the name "DJ MCP"...)

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#229

Post by bigiain »

kasey_junk wrote: post #58
bitwize wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

> Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t.

I'd bet that while "shoveling data at llm agents" might not be a fad, sometime fairly soon doing so for free while someone else's VC money picks up the planet destroying data center costs will stop being a thing. Imagine if every PHP or Ruby on Rails, or Python/Django site had started out and locked themselves into a free tier Oracle database, then one day Oracle's licensing lawyers started showing up to charge people for their WordPress blog.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#230

Post by NomDePlum »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #224
NomDePlum wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's not my understanding. Hypermedia, as I understand it, are embedded links in responses that present possible forward actions. They are structured in a way that machine program could parse and use. I don't believe it requires human-in-the-loop, although that is of course possible.

HTML is a hypermedia format, the most widely used, and it's designed mainly for human consumption. Machines parsing and using something is too broad an idea to engage with meaningfully: browsers parse HTML and do something with it: they present it to humans to select actions (i.e. hypermedia controls) to perform. Your understanding is incorrect, the links above will explain it. HATEOAS (and REST, which is a superset…

I've programmed machines to use those links so I'm pretty certain machines can use it. I've never heard of the HTML variation but so will have a look at those links.
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