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What if you don't need MCP at all?

mariozechner.at

21–30 of 194 posts

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#23
LLMs were trained on the how we use text interfaces. You don't need to adopt command line for an LLM to use. You don't really need RAG - just connect the LLM to the shell tools we are using for search. And ultimately it would be much more useful if the language servers had good cli commands and LLMs were using them instead of going via MCP or some other internal path - ripgrep is already showing how much more usable it is this way.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#24
I can see where Mario is coming from, but IMO MCP still has a place because it 1) solves authentication+discoverability, 2) doesn't require code execution.

MCP shines when you want to add external functionality to an agent quickly, and in situations where it's not practical to let an agent go wild with code execution and network access.

Feels like we're in the "backlash to the early hype" part of the hype cycle. MCP is one way to give agents access to tools; it's OK that it doesn't work for every possible use case.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#26
post #14

Yeah, "MCP" felt like BS from jump. Basically it's the problem that will always be a problem, namely "AI stuff is non-deterministic." If there was some certainty MCP could add to this equation that would perhaps be theoretically nice, but otherwise it's just .. parsing, a perhaps not "solved" problem, but one for which there's already ample solutions.

Why are they nondeterministic? You can use a fixed seed or temperature=0.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#29
I like MCP for _remote_ services such as Linear, Notion, or Sentry. I authenticate once and Claude has the relevant access to access the remote data. Same goes for my team by committing the config.

Can I “just call the API”? Yeah, but that takes extra work, and my goal is to reduce extra work.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#30

MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense. "What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!" LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP. Not…

probably easier to just tell people: You want MCP? Add a "description" field to your rest API that describes how to call it. That's all it's doing. Just plain ole context pollution. World could be better served by continuing to build out the APIs that exist.

> Add a "description" field to your rest API that describes how to call it.

Isn't that swagger\grpc etc?

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