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MCP is dead; long live MCP

chrlschn.dev

11–20 of 231 posts

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#12
MCP is a fixed specification/protocol for AI app communication (built on top of an HTTP CRUD app). This is absolutely the right way to go for anything that wants to interoperate with an AI app.

For a long time now, SWEs seem to have bamboozled into thinkg the only way you can connect different applications together are "integrations" (tightly coupling your app into the bespoke API of another app). I'm very happy somebody finally remembered what protocols are for: reusable communications abstractions that are application-agnostic.

The point of MCP is to be a common communications language, in the same way HTTP is, FTP is, SMTP, IMAP, etc. This is absolutely necessary since you can (and will) use AI for a million different things, but AI has specific kinds of things it might want to communicate with specific considerations. If you haven't yet, read the spec: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#13
post #9

If it's a remote API, I suppose the argument is that you might as well fetch the documentation from the remote server, rather than using a skill that might go out of date. You're trusting the API provider anyway. But it's putting a lot of trust in the remote server not to prompt-inject you, perhaps accidentally. Also, what if the remote docs don't suit local conditions? You could make local edits to a skill if needed…

Or just build your own remote MCP server for docs? It's easy enough now that the protocol and supporting SDKs have stabilized.

Most folks are familiar with MCP tools but not so much MCP resources[0] and MCP prompts[1]. I'd make the case that these latter two are way more powerful and significant because (most) tools support them (to varying degrees at the moment, to be fair).

For teams/orgs, these are really powerful because they simplify delivery of skills and docs and moves them out of the repo (yes, there are benefits to this, especially when the content is applicable across multiple repos) on top of surfacing telemetry that informs usage and efficacy.

Why would you do it? One reason is that now you can index your docs with more powerful tools. Postgres FTS, graph databases to build a knowledge base, extract code snippets and build a best practices snippet repo, automatically link related documents by using search, etc.

[0] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#14
post #2

As soon as MCP came out I thought it was over engineered crud and didn’t invest any time in it. I have yet to regret this decision. Same thing with LangChain. This is one key difference between experienced and inexperienced devs; if something looks like crud, it probably is crud. Don’t follow or do something because it’s popular at the time.

LangChain is not over-engineered; it's not engineered at all. Pure Chaos.

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#15

> Centralization is Key > (I preface that this is primarily relevant for orgs and enterprises; it really has no relevance for individual vibe-coders) The thing about tools that "democratize" software development, whether it is Visual Studio/Delphi/QT or LLMs, is that you wind up with people in organizations building internal tools on which business processes will depend who do not understand that centralization is ke…

On the other hand, I've seen over-centralization completely crush the hopes and dreams of people with good ideas.

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#16
MCP is fine, particular remote MCP which is the lowest friction way to get access to some hosted service with auth handled for you.

However, MCP is context bloat and not very good compared to CLIs + skills mechanically. With a CLI you get the ability to filter/pipe (regular Unix bash) without having to expand the entire tool call every single time in context.

CLIs also let you use heredoc for complex inputs that are otherwise hard to escape.

CLIs can easily generate skills from the —help output, and add agent specific instructions on top. That means you can give the agent all the instructions it needs to know how to use the tools, what tools exist, lazy loaded, and without bloating the context window with all the tools upfront (yes, I know tool search in Claude partially solves this).

CLIs also don’t have to run persistent processes like MCP but can if needed

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's say you have a rag llm chat api connected to an enterprises document corpus. Do you not expose an mcp endpoint? Literally every vscode or opencode node gets it for free (a small json snippet in their mcp.json config) If you do auth right

Not only editors, but also different runtime contexts like GitHub Agents running in Actions. We can plug in MCP almost anywhere with just a small snippet of JSON and because we're serving it from a server, we get very clear telemetry regardless of tooling and envrionment.

What are you using for hosting and deploying the MCP servers? I’d like something low friction for enterprise teams to be able to push their MCP definitions as easily as pushing a Git repo (or ideally, as part of a Git repo, kinda like GitHub pages). It’s obviously not sustainable for every team to host their own MCP servers in their own way.

So what’s the best centralized gateway available today, with telemetry and auth and all the goodness espoused in this blog post?

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#18
post #2

As soon as MCP came out I thought it was over engineered crud and didn’t invest any time in it. I have yet to regret this decision. Same thing with LangChain. This is one key difference between experienced and inexperienced devs; if something looks like crud, it probably is crud. Don’t follow or do something because it’s popular at the time.

All the code I work on now has an MCP interface so that the LLM can debug more easily. I'd argue it is as important as the UI these days. The amount of time it has saved me is unreal. It might be worth investing a very small amount of your time in it to see if it is a good fit. Even a poor protocol can provide useful functionality.

Our workflows must be massively different.

I code in 8 languages, regularly, for several open source and industry projects.

I use AI a lot nowadays, but have never ever interacted with an MCP server.

I have no idea what I'm missing. I am very interested in learning more about what do you use it for.

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#19

This came up in recent discussions about the Google apps CLI that was recently released. Google initially included an MCP server but then removed it silently - and some people believe this is because of how many different things the Google Workspace CLI exposes, which would flood the context. And it seemed like in social media, suddenly a lot of people were talking about how MCP is dead. But fundamentally that doesn’…

MCP loads all tools immediately. CLI does not because it’s not auto exposed to the agent, got have more control of how the context of which tools exist, and how to deliver that context.

Re: MCP is dead; long live MCP

#20

MCP is a fixed specification/protocol for AI app communication (built on top of an HTTP CRUD app). This is absolutely the right way to go for anything that wants to interoperate with an AI app. For a long time now, SWEs seem to have bamboozled into thinkg the only way you can connect different applications together are "integrations" (tightly coupling your app into the bespoke API of another app). I'm very happy some…

If AI is AI, why does it need a protocol to figure out how to interact with HTTP, FTP, etc.? MCP is a way to quickly get those integrations up and running, but purely because the underlying technology has not lived up to its hyped abilities so far. That's why people think of MCP as a band-aid fix.
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