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MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

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Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#261
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?

Yahoo Pipes, XMPP, self-hosted blogs, RSS-based social networks, pingbacks; the democratized p2p web that briefly was. I bet capitalism will go 2 for 2 against the naive idealism that gatekeepers will stop gatekeeping.

Giving value away is unacceptable… for MBAs and VCs, anyway.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 way it would call any other api: exactly when it was programmed to.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#264
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…

Exactly. It’s a crack in the MBA’s anti-commoditization wall. Right now it’s like USB-C. If we’re lucky it will turn into TCP/IP and transform the whole economy.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#265
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…

The pressure to monetize after all those humungous investments into AI will surely move some things that have been stuck in their ways and stagnant. It looks like this time the IT industry itself will be among those that are being disrupted.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#266
post #27
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…

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…

Well, interoperability requires competition and if there's one thing we've learnt it's that the tech industry loves a private monopoly.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#267
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wasn’t aware of this, it’s extremely shortsighted. My employees’ chats are my company’s data, and I should be able to use them as I see fit. Restricting API access to our own data moves them quickly in to the 'too difficult to continue doing business with' category. The reality is that Slack isn’t that sticky. The only reason I fended off the other business units who've demanded Microsoft Teams through the years is…

We migrated from Slack to Teams and while it does work, it’s also not very good (UI/UX wise). We also did try out Rocket.Chat and Mattermost and out of all of those Mattermost was the closest to Slack and the most familiar to us.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#268
post #83
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very different to blockchain hype I had similar skepticism initially, but I would recommend you dip toe in water on it before making judgement The conversational/voice AI tech now dropping + the current LLMs + MCP/tools/functions to mix in vendor APIs and private data/services etc. really feels like a new frontier It's not 100% but it's close enough for a lot of usecases now and going to change a lot of ways we…

Probably my judgement is a bit fogged. But if I get asked about building AI into our apps just one more time I am absolutely going to drop my job and switch careers

Rule of thumb: the companies building the models are not selling hype. Or at least the hype is mostly justified. Everyone else, treat with extreme skepticism.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#269
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…

Reminds me of the days of Winsock. For those that don't remember/don't know, everything network related in Windows used to use their own, proprietary setup. Then one day, a bunch of vendors got together and decided to have a shared standard to the benefit of basically everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock

Trumpet Winsock! Brings back memories :)

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#270
Can someone help me find an actual explanation of what MCP does? The official MCP documentation completely fails at explaining how it works and what it does. For example the quick start for server developers[1] doesn’t actually explain anything. Sure in the Python examples they add @mcp annotations but WHAT DOES IT DO? I feel like I’m going crazy reading their docs because there’s nothing of substance in there.

Let’s assume I want to write an MCP HTTP server without a library, just an HTTP handler, how do I do it? What’s its schema? If I want to call an MCP server from curl what endpoint do I call? Can someone help me find where this is documented?

[1]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/server

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