MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces

The apps are LLM agnostic, so all MCP apps will be portable. Economically, this means developers don’t have convince users to pay $20 a month, these users are already paying that. Devs just have to convince users to buy the app on the platform.

I don’t see this being the future state. We’d be talking about a world where any and all apps exist inside of fucking ChatGPT and that just sounds ridiculous.

How reliable are the processes which these things run?

I'm processing thousands of files using Copilot, and even 20 at a time, it usually skips a couple, and sometimes, when skipping, it merges the data from one file to the next, not applying anything to the second file, other times it completely applies the data parsed from one file to the second --- not a big deal since I'm reviewing each operation manually, but the only reason the error rate is acceptable is the files are so inconsistent that normal techniques weren't working.

Is there an equivalent to "double-keying" where two different LLMs process the same input and it only moves forward if both match perfectly?

Or just APIs in general.

MCP is incredibly vibe-coded. We know how to make APIs. We know how to make two-way communications. And yet "let's invent new terminology that makes little sense and awkward workarounds on top of unidirectional protocols and call it the best thing since sliced cheese".

You are touching on an important point. Basically OpenAI and others provide a lot of poorly integrated tools and components. You can build nice things with those but you have to deal with a lot of issues and it's a non trivial amount of work that even they aren't doing apparently. Even such a simple thing as triggering an OAuth signin to get access to models is not part of SDKs. Most developer tools require configuring API keys in some file instead. No normal user is ever going to do that,.

Things like ChatGPT are remarkably limited from a UX/UI point of view. The product can do amazing things but the UI is nothing special. The mac version currently has a bug where option+shift+1 opens a chat window but doesn't give it focus. When I do that from vs code it adds the editor window. But it's completely blind to any browser tab on which I do that. I'm sure there are good reasons for all that. But it strikes me a bit as a work in progress that a good product owner would spot.

With apps some of the more powerful capabilities (llms driving UIs directly, doing things in agentic loops, tool and API usage) are going to require much deeper integrations than are currently there. We get hints of what is possible and nice technology demos. But it's still hard to build more complicated workflows around this. Unless you build your own applications.

We've been staring at this from the point of view of automating some highly tedious stuff that we currently do in our company manually. For example, working with chat GPT seems to involve a lot of copy paste and manually doing things that it can't really do by itself. Even something as simple as working on a document it will do alright work on the text but then make a complete mess of the formatting. I spend an hour a few days ago iterating on a document where I was basically just fixing bullets and headers. Most alternatives I've tried aren't any better at this.

None of this seems particularly hard; it's just a lot of integration work that just hasn't happened yet. We have a bunch of lego bricks, not a lot of fully mature solutions. MCP isn't a full solution, it's a pretty lego brick. Mostly even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't getting around to doing much more than simplistic technology demos with their own stuff. IMHO their product teams are a lot less remarkable than their AI teams.

We already have AG-UI [0], which has been implemented by frameworks like Microsoft agent framework, pydantic AI and llamaindex. I guess they'll just have to duplicate functionality.

Sigh.

[0] https://docs.ag-ui.com/introduction