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MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#351

Post by solumunus »

mh- wrote: post #50
sshine wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

I use both daily and Teams absolutely sucks.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#352

Post by int_19h »

jadar wrote: post #4

I 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…

This is exactly what the author is saying. It is "the idea of APIs in general" that has suddenly become a fad under the guise of MCP, riding the AI wave. And it may well be a very imperfect way to build APIs, but if it eventually becomes the standard to the point where every app has to offer it, it's still "good enough" and would massively improve interoperability all around as a side effect.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#353

Post by TeMPOraL »

diggan wrote: post #333
TeMPOraL wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor point but arguably both are Yahoo Pipes-type glue provider, which itself is basic no-code glue thing. The difference is that IFTTT erred on the side of dumbing the product down too much, and Zapier erred on the side of being too much B2B-focused - so they both missed the mark on becoming the universal glue.

Then of course we have Node-Red too, which probably is too developer focused (and generally just lacking any sort of focus at the same time, strangely), so also doesn't sit somewhere closer to the middle. Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet? What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work? Someone has to thinking about this.

If we're considering Node-Red, it would not be amiss to also mention N8N - which, mirroring the IFTTT/Zapier split, is basically the opposite of Node-Red on the "let's turn this into an enterprise product" scale.

> Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet?

I don't know of anything. There's some new products I saw heavily promoted on LinkedIn, but at first glance they feel like IFTTT with a shiny coat of paint.

> What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work?

At this point I think ComfyUI or the node editor in Blender would be the best; they're oriented for different kinds of workflows, but UIs of both are excellent in their own ways, and the rest is a matter of implementing the right blocks.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#354

Post by purerandomness »

alex-moon wrote: post #290

I always say this whenever anyone asks about whether something is "just hype". One day I will write a blog post on it. Long story short: every piece of new tech is "just hype" until the surrounding ecosystem is built for it. Trains are just hype until you cover the country in railway lines. Telephony is just hype until everyone has a telephone. Email is just hype until everyone has a personal computer (and a reason t…

The differentiating factor is when the hype is justified with the implementation of the actual implementation. Then it's "hype", followed by adaptation and commoditization.

With "just hype" however, there is no such step. It's hype without the following implementation: NFTs, the "Metaverse", Blockchain and "smart contracts", and of course their ancestors (tulip bulbs, 3D VRML worlds, ...) weren't simply new technology: They were solutions in search of a problem; a Ponzi Scheme where it was clear that there will be no actual implementation following, because it wouldn't make sense.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#355

Post by skeeter2020 »

asteroidburger wrote: post #287
stavros wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MCP itself doesn't require the use of the LLM. There are other concepts, but for this use, Tools are key. A Tool is an operation, like a search. Have a look at the Filesystem example MCP server - https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/blob/main/sr... . It has a collection of Tools - read_file, read_multiple_files, write_file, etc. The LLM uses MCP to learn what tools the server makes available; the LLM decid…

getting the LLM to use your tool is actually tougher than it should be. You don't get to decide that deterministically. I don't get what benefit there would be to build an MCP server without an LLM-based agent. You might as well build an API and get the value from a strict, predictable interface & results.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#356

Post by int_19h »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #192
Maxious wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As https://www.stainless.com/blog/mcp-is-eating-the-world--and-... recaps, tool calling existed before MCP, some vague standards existed, nothing took off, no really normal users don't want to just download the OpenAPI spec. Anthropic wants to define another standard now btw https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/desktop-extensions

Normal users don't know what MCP is and will never use an MCP server (knowingly or unknowingly) in their life. They use ChatGPT through the web UI or the mobile app, that's it. MCP is for technical users. (Maybe read the link you sent, it has nothing to do with defining a new standard)

Normal users will increasingly use MCP servers without even knowing they do so - it will be their apps. And having e.g. your music player or your email client light up in the ChatGPT app as something that you can tell it to automate is not just for technical users.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#357

Post by int_19h »

billmcneale wrote: post #223
vaxman wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"COM" by itself is a rather broad umbrella. What you're describing seems to be OLE Automation. That's the one that has type libraries (which you need for discoverability).

And then Active Scripting was supposed to be how you'd script those endpoints...

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#358

Post by msgodel »

mh- wrote: post #50
sshine wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

A big part of my short thesis with Apple is that they'll try to do this sort of thing and it will mean real AI integration like what their customers want will simply never be available, driving them to more open platforms.

I think you'll see this everywhere. LLMs mean "normal" people will suddenly see computers the way we do and a lot of corporate leadership just isn't intuitively prepared for that.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#359

Post by mh- »

solumunus wrote: post #351
mh- wrote: 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 use both daily and Teams absolutely sucks.

Very aware, zero desire to use Teams, that's why I've fought to keep Slack despite the cost.

But now they're actively making it more difficult for people like me to say "engineers like it more" and that be a compelling-enough argument.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#360

Post by citizenpaul »

sshine wrote: post #27
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…

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…

MCP it's like API but with 100,000x the operating cost!
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