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MCP is dead?

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Re: MCP is dead?

#101

Post by red_hare »

rgbrenner wrote: post #16

The article has no date on it, but says deferred tool loading is a recent update that occurred after the article was written. Deferred tool loading was added in Nov 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use So these numbers are at least 7 months out of date. Why is this being posted now?

+1

Its crazy that people are still discussing this. It's ancient history. Deferred tool loading, large contexts, and prompt caching have made 2026 completely different from 2025.

Also, the "CLI saves token" debate really falls apart when step one of using the CLI is running "--help". The problem remains: if knowing how to call the thing isn't in parametric memory, it has to be in context.

Re: MCP is dead?

#102

Post by monkpit »

speff wrote: post #11

My mental model for MCPs is that it's like a Swagger/OpenAPI spec for LLMs. Point 2 doesn't make much sense in that context as it's describing MCP as a Swagger endpoint that's unstable. Chrome/Ghidra MCP does have a tendency of crashing, but I'm not sure why this is. Is my way of thinking of MCP incorrect? If it really is a descriptor of how to talk to another tool, then why do they seem fragile at times? I feel like…

What is special about MCP to make it any more or less fragile than any other software?

MCP is a combination of a server responding to requests, and a prompt to tell the agent how to format those requests.

Re: MCP is dead?

#103

Post by monkpit »

noodletheworld wrote: post #10
eikenberry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MCP seems like what you'd do when you want to encapsulate and share a skill+script in a standard way.

You can share a skill by copy pasting the text file to someone in slack. Its not that hard.

You can’t sell that in b2b negotiations though. You can absolutely say “and for $x per user we will grant you access to our central, closed-source MCP server that does things our CLI doesn’t do”.

Re: MCP is dead?

#104

Post by monkpit »

dannypdx wrote: post #64

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'.

You should disclose that you are behind g8e.

Re: MCP is dead?

#105

Post by OpenWaygate »

I used to compare MCP and Skill in my post (AI-assisted [1]) and also maintain a CLI/MCP/Skill for YouTube.

In my opinion, MCP is not dead. "MCP Belongs to Software Engineering", it ships existing concepts from software engineering into AI. CLI, MCP-tools, and OpenAPI are interchangeable to some degree, but MCP is more than tools; there are mcp-apps[2], lazy load in context[3].

[1]: https://log.ifor.dev/posts/mcp_vs_skill/

[2]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/extensions/apps/overview

[3]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/tool-search

Re: MCP is dead?

#106

Post by red_hare »

wild_egg wrote: post #32
rgbrenner wrote: post #16

The article has no date on it, but says deferred tool loading is a recent update that occurred after the article was written. Deferred tool loading was added in Nov 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use So these numbers are at least 7 months out of date. Why is this being posted now?

Deferred tool loading is not part of MCP. It's a Claude API special parameter that most other LLM APIs do not support.

OpenAI API also supports defer_loading https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-tool-sea...

And it's not actually necessary for it to exist at the API level. It's a pattern. Making it API-side is just an optimization.

To do it client-side: 1. Define a single tool, tool_search 2. List the names of your deferred tools in context (or tool_search's description) 3. When tool_search is called, match the query against the tool names (or names + descriptions) 4. Append the matched tool def to the context in a new -esque tag

Claude Code (as of the leak) does this client side. You can even see the custom matching function and A/B tests about whether to include the descriptions.

Whether or not that tool definition comes from MCP or a local definition is kind of beside the point.

Re: MCP is dead?

#107

Post by ericyd »

> Restaurant analogy:

> You sit down and 10 menus (MCP tool definitions) are spread across the table

> There's no room left for actual food (your work)

> Every time you order, the menus have to be pulled out again

This is a bad analogy. Ordering repeatedly is uncommon except for tapas restaurants. You could easily put food on top of menus, but more commonly, menus are removed after ordering, thereby freeing the table (context??) for the food. If you're going to try to explain things by analogy, it's worth putting effort into making it more relevant.

Re: MCP is dead?

#108

Post by BeetleB »

wild_egg wrote: post #32
rgbrenner wrote: post #16

The article has no date on it, but says deferred tool loading is a recent update that occurred after the article was written. Deferred tool loading was added in Nov 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use So these numbers are at least 7 months out of date. Why is this being posted now?

Deferred tool loading is not part of MCP. It's a Claude API special parameter that most other LLM APIs do not support.

On the flip side, Claude is at fault in not letting you choose which tools on which MCP servers to keep in context. When I first starting using MCP about a year ago (not on Claude Code), my tools actually let me selectively turn on/off individual tools.

Crazy that the company that invented MCP is not putting basic features like this in the product.

Re: MCP is dead?

#109

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Then give the CLI a man page.

Re: MCP is dead?

#110

Post by firasd »

Do CLI enjoyers realize that MCP can be called via curl?

For example I have a no-auth clock for AI deployed from https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock to https://mcpclock.firasd.workers.dev/mcp (anyone is welcome to go ahead and add it to your AI apps as an MCP endpoint)

You can still call it via CLI if you're a MCP hater

curl -s -X POST "https://mcpclock.firasd.workers.dev/mcp" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id": 1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"clock_get","arguments":{}}}' event: message data: {"result":{"content":[{"type":"text","text":"[\n {\n \"timezone\": \"UTC\",\n \"iso\": \"2026-05-30T04:05:07.175Z\",\n \"unixtime\": 1780113907\n },\n {\n \"timezone\": \"Alphadec\",\n \"alphadec\": \"2026_K6G7_066464\"\n }\n]"}]},"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1}

curl -s -X POST "https://mcpclock.firasd.workers.dev/mcp" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id": 1,"method":"tools/list","params":{"name":"","arguments": {}}}' 2>&1 | grep '^data:' | sed 's/^data: //'| jq -r '.result. tools[].name' clock_get clock_day_info clock_convert clock_convert_alphadec clock_convert_unixtime clock_shift_utc clock_delta_utc clock_delta_alphadec

The "just use a CLI" crowd is implicitly assuming:

1) You're a developer 2) On a laptop 3) With a shell open Inside an agentic coding harness (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor) 4) Working on a software project 5) That's like... maybe 2% of AI usage.

The other 98% is: Someone on the ChatGPT iOS app asking a question on the subway; Someone in Claude.ai web chatting about their calendar; Someone using ChatGPT Desktop to summarize their Notion; A non-developer using AI in a browser at work; Voice mode on a phone; An embedded chat widget on some company's website...

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