Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MCP is dead?

quandri.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 444 posts

Re: MCP is dead?

#61

Post by lazyasciiart »

throwpoaster wrote: post #54
ford wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically MCP is little more than a brand name for "APIs LLM's can use". This means more services are creating APIs, because xyz company who's never been super tech forward doesn't want their tools to be obsolete when everyone uses agents. Overall, I am in favor of this goal. I'm not sure this is the protocol I'd choose to accomplish it, but it's the one people hear about, and the one they're using.

I suggest you implement an MCP server before adopting this as a firm technical opinion.

The opinion that more companies creating APIs is good?

Re: MCP is dead?

#62

Post by goalieca »

mxstbr wrote: post #22

I run the team at OpenAI that's responsible for the ChatGPT App Store, Codex plugins, and all things MCP. The thing that all these "MCP is dead" posts are missing is that whether or not MCP is used as a transport protocol is actually completely irrelevant. The reason MCP isn't dead is because practically ~every company on the planet is building an MCP server. I know this because we interact with all of them. Most of…

What do you think about MCP security being limited as it is. Frankly, it seems mathematically impossible.

Re: MCP is dead?

#64

Post by dannypdx »

MCP is just one of many -insecure- protocols that will be swallowed by a runtime governance protocol (like g8e) that is purpose-built for security, not to 'move fast and break stuff'.

Re: MCP is dead?

#65

Post by 827a »

The idea that MCP tool definitions take up a certain number of tokens is laughable. That's an implementation detail of the agent harness. MCP is just an API specification. Hell, there's nothing in it that makes it much of any different than OpenAPI, except that its a bit more local-dev focused. There's a thousand things harnesses can and do do to optimize MCP beyond just "spit out the raw MCP output into the context window and pray".

Re: MCP is dead?

#66

Post by dnautics »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #57
jimbokun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You failed to describe what value the MCP protocol provides. If all of these companies spent equivalent time writing a CLI for agents to consume as they spend on MCP servers, would they be any worse off in terms of agents being able to interact with their products?

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is v…

i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.

Re: MCP is dead?

#67

Post by CharlieDigital »

mxstbr wrote: post #22

I run the team at OpenAI that's responsible for the ChatGPT App Store, Codex plugins, and all things MCP. The thing that all these "MCP is dead" posts are missing is that whether or not MCP is used as a transport protocol is actually completely irrelevant. The reason MCP isn't dead is because practically ~every company on the planet is building an MCP server. I know this because we interact with all of them. Most of…

It would be really, really great if Codex could support MCP Prompts[0]

This would allow us to deliver standard prompts across the team without having to sync manually or with scripts; keep everyone up to date. Even allow per-user customization of "skills" via server rendering of the prompts.

AFAIK, Codex is the only major harness to not support this.

[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/5059#issuecomment-453...

Re: MCP is dead?

#68

Post by 827a »

jimbokun wrote: post #33
mxstbr wrote: post #22

I run the team at OpenAI that's responsible for the ChatGPT App Store, Codex plugins, and all things MCP. The thing that all these "MCP is dead" posts are missing is that whether or not MCP is used as a transport protocol is actually completely irrelevant. The reason MCP isn't dead is because practically ~every company on the planet is building an MCP server. I know this because we interact with all of them. Most of…

You failed to describe what value the MCP protocol provides. If all of these companies spent equivalent time writing a CLI for agents to consume as they spend on MCP servers, would they be any worse off in terms of agents being able to interact with their products?

Yes, in the same way a programming language would be worse off if they focused all of their effort on building an implementation instead of a language specification.

You could literally, deterministically, zero AI, code-gen a CLI from an MCP specification, just like you can with an OpenAPI specification. I'm sure tools exist that do this. So if you want a CLI, there it is.

But the problem with a CLI is that it requires a shell environment, and not everywhere you may want to run an agent should or can have access to a shell. MCP enables the harness to tightly control that access. MCP allows the user to easily allowlist/denylist specific tools, or categorize tools into "ask me every time" versus "don't ask me just do it". Doing any of this with a CLI is really hard because CLIs are all very different; yes, AIs can easily learn how to use them, but that might be exactly what you don't want, hey AI don't issue that aws ec2 delete-instance command ah crap there it goes I wish I could have just denylisted its access to that tool.

Re: MCP is dead?

#69

Post by ex-aws-dude »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #57
jimbokun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You failed to describe what value the MCP protocol provides. If all of these companies spent equivalent time writing a CLI for agents to consume as they spend on MCP servers, would they be any worse off in terms of agents being able to interact with their products?

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is v…

Isn’t that basically just a —help flag though?

Still easily doable with CLI

Re: MCP is dead?

#70

Post by CharlieDigital »

dnautics wrote: post #66
fnordpiglet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is v…

i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.

MCP is more than is more than tools. Tools is one of three major features: prompts[0] and resources[1] being the other two.

Prompts are effectively "server delivered skills" which are are quite powerful because it solves a distribution and synchronization problem. It also allows server materialization and dynamic construction of skills.

MCP also has a few other under utilized mechanisms: elicitation[2] on the client side and completions on the server side[3]. It is an API of sorts, but specialized for agent harness server interactions.

[0] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/

[2] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/cli...

[3] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/ser...

Post reply on HN