What if you don't need MCP at all?

Even with zero temperature (and some of the latest models don’t allow that) you’re still not absolutely guaranteed deterministic output.

Yeah there's no there there when it comes to MCP. It's crazy to me that the world bought into the idea when the "spec" literally boils down to "have your server give the LLM some json". Just illustrates how powerful it is to attach names to things, especially in a hypestorm in which everyone is already frothing at the mouth and reason is hard to come by. Give people some word they can utter to help them sound like they're on the "bleeding edge" and they'll buy into it even if it's totally pointless.

This is the key. MCP encapsulates tools, auth, instructions.

We always need something for that - and it needs to work for non tech users too

Hey we actually just released rtrvr.ai, our AI Web Agent Chrome Extension, as a Remote MCP Server that obviates lot of the setup you needed to do. We had the same intuition that the easiest way to scrape is through your own browser and so we expose dedicated MCP tools to do actions, scrape pages, and execute arbitrary code in Chrome's built in sandbox.

We give a copy/pasteable MCP url that you can use with your favorite agent/chatbot/site and give those providers browser context and allow them to do browser actions.

So compared to Playwright MCP and others that require you to run npx and can only be connected to local clients, with ours you just paste a url and can use with any client.

Checkout our recent posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898043 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4BTWNTuE-s

MCP is how you wrap/distribute/compose things related to tool-use. Tool-use is how you insist on an IO schema that LLMs must conform to. Schemas are how you combat hallucination, and how you can use AI in structured ways for things that it wasn't explicitly trained on. And this is really just scratching the surface of what MCP is for.

You can throw all that away by rejecting MCP completely or by boiling tool-use down to just generating and running unstructured shell commands. But setting aside security issues or why you'd want to embrace more opportunities for hallucination instead of less.. shelling out for everything is perfect faith in the model's ability to generate correct bash for an infinite space of CLI surfaces. You've lost the ability to ever pivot to smaller/cheaper/local models, and now you're more addicted to external vendors/SOTA models.

Consider the following workflow with a large CLI surface that's a candidate for a dedicated LLM tool, maybe ffmpeg. Convert the man page to a JSON schema. Convert the JSON schema to a tool. Add the tool to a MCP server, alongside similar wizards for imagemagick/blender. The first steps can use SOTA models if necessary, but the later steps can all feasibly work for free, as a stand-alone app that has no cloud footprint and no subscription fee. This still works if ffmpeg/blender/imagemagick were private custom tools instead of well-known tools that are decades old. You can test the tools in offline isolation too. And since things like fastmcp support server composition you can push and pop that particular stack of wizards in or out of LLM capabilities.

Good luck getting real composition with markdown files and tweaking prompts for tone by adding a "Please" preamble. Good luck engineering real systems with vague beliefs about magic, no concrete specifications for any part of any step, constantly changing external dependencies, and perfect faith in vendors.