Feels like we’re continuing to trend toward deterministic workflows which may actually be okay in 90% of cases. Reality is there’s a lot of unnecessary token burn happening right now. Simple market dynamics will solve that, i.e., when token cost subsidies begin to fade away and we face the true cost of agent applications.
MCP is dead?
91–100 of 444 posts
Re: MCP is dead?
#92I don't know about it being dead, but i certainly stopped using it because it kills the context. A huge amount of tokens are wasted to mcp when in use. Skills use far fewer tokens. From my experience anyway. I'm also not advanced enough so maybe I'm not using it right.
Re: MCP is dead?
#93I 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?
Not a fan of MCPs for my personal use, but I still think the value for companies is obvious. The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. You only need to "trust" the MCP client implementation, not a thousand different CLIs. Also being a standard HTTP endpoint, a lot of logic can be offloaded to proxies and such.
The second value is more about how business works. There is no chance you can convince someone at WalMart to fund and release a `wmctl` that allows you to search and buy products. Now try to convince your regional Pizza chain to release a CLI too. WalMart and such are incentivized however to create "Whatever OpenAI and Anthropic integrate with". Shopify can create an MCP for every shop and allow the shop owner to customize it. Creating a CLI per shop makes no sense. OpenAI and Anthropic prefer MCPs because of the first benefit. So it works out for all parties involved.
Re: MCP is dead?
#94I 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…
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.
[deleted]
Re: MCP is dead?
#95I 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?
The value is that many companies like building MCP servers much more than CLIs. For whatever reason.
Here's some companies that offer MCP servers but don't seem to offer an equally featured CLI:
- Asana
- Square
- Linear
- Dropbox
- Canva
- Slack (sorta)
- Figma (sorta)
Should they all be offering CLI tools? IMHO, yes absolutely. But an MCP server gets much more interest. I'd rather encourage them to keep improving and supporting their MCP services than telling them to drop it for a CLI.
There's lots of things like this in technology where you end up stuck with the first thing because its popularity perpetuates itself. The QWERTY keyboard I'm typing this on is a prime example. x86 is another one.
Re: MCP is dead?
#96I 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…
I totally agree, we’ve been working with enterprises and MCP is the defacto way they are using agents with data.
Re: MCP is dead?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Did you consider that maybe he has different information than you do, and thus he holds a different opinion? I for one love MCP. It's way faster in my experience than skills / shell. And I like how (with Claude Code) I can setup the MCP in the web interface, use it in the chat and the CLI. Plus the flow to add an MCP via the browser is achievable to any user. And one thing I don't understand of skills is this. I have…
Usually with secrets in environment variables or headers.
Re: MCP is dead?
#98If you build connectors for yourself or your team, you probably can skip MCP because you can tell your friends to install CLI or whatever and provide extra prompts for your CLI. If you have external users, then you have to use MCP, which comes with how to use each endpoint and etc. MCP is what their current apps e.g. Cowork, Cursor support out-of-the-box . In that sense, MCP is very much not dead
If you need a network boundary, what MCP provides that REST API + llms.txt can't do?
Re: MCP is dead?
#99I never understand the "eats context" argument. Why do you have so many MCP enabled in the first place? Do you actually use them in every project?
So you have to manually enable/disable every MCP? What fun...
Re: MCP is dead?
#100I 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…
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.
Yeah it was quite weird seeing "Many of these companies don't even have an external API!" given MCP is literally a protocol for an external API. Not a good one in my opinion but it indeed has mindshare.