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Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

simonwillison.net

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Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#161

Post by __alias »

whazor wrote: post #100

MCPs are very exciting. They now support IFrames (MCP Apps) as well. Now that the models are getting better, you can trust them to book barber appointments, order groceries, manage your calendar, etc etc. It's significantly lazier to ask an agent to do something than manually doing it. Especially with voice to text. I'm predicting that chat bots will auto-discover MCPs from trusted websites and make life much easier.

I agree. The natural next step is to have an MCP for a global directory of MCPs that an agent can search to complete jobs.

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#162

Post by fosterfriends »

Love using MCP, working on adding it as a first-class surface to products I’m developing. Agent experience is becoming as important or more than user importance for some products. Big fan of AgentCat and other tools for applying MCP observability - can't improve what you don't measure

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#163

Post by est »

> older stateful MCP (I’m going to call it “legacy MCP”) required two HTTP requests

What? I never realized it was the case. I was calling my handcrafted MCP server without the header all the time!

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#164

Post by ljm »

ai_critic wrote: post #50

It is amazing that folks getting paid several hundred thousand dollars a year...reinvented RPC-over-HTTP/JSON. You too, fellow web developers, are smart enough to work at Anthropic. I would love to see a proper engineering post-mortem for how this happened.

It's still too early stage for me. Anthropic needs to mature for a little longer before they're enlightened enough to understand my kafka-based event sourcing model for cross-agent orchestration. Kafka, protobuf, functional domain modelling using F# as a DSL...the whole kit and kaboodle.

Only when my AI and its subagents are modelled through a graph of producing agents, consuming agents, and agentic mailboxes, will Claude Code truly shine.

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#166

Post by vidarh »

fergie wrote: post #94
ai_critic wrote: post #50

It is amazing that folks getting paid several hundred thousand dollars a year...reinvented RPC-over-HTTP/JSON. You too, fellow web developers, are smart enough to work at Anthropic. I would love to see a proper engineering post-mortem for how this happened.

It does seem like a return to RPC/REST over HTTP (maybe I am missing some subtleties), which makes sense to me since I never really understood the advantage that MCP bestowed.

The core advantage MCP gave you was a standard that by virtue of being blessed by AI providers people had strong incentives to actually implement.

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#167

Post by an0malous »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #37

I still don't get MCP. Most likely because I didn't really check but the first feeling is creating a problem to solve a problem that doesn't exist in the first place.

The people who promote it don’t get it either but the inmates are running the prison now so we have to pretend like “stateless MCP” isn’t just rebranded REST APIs

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#168

Post by vidarh »

firasd wrote: post #11

I think stateless-type MCP was already possible, eg my MCP Clock [ https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock ]: > 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":{}}}' | grep '^data:' | sed 's/^data: //'| jq {"result": {"content": [{"type":…

It was already possible, but it requires 1) an MCP server that terminates connections, and/or 2) for both the client and the servers to gracefully handle terminations and reconnections without bothering users with it.

As for the "just use a CLI" crowd, stateless MCP servers should satisfy us too - it means providing an mcp CLI tool that provides all the benefits of a CLI with access to all the API's exposed over MCP has just become easier.

Re: Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

#170

Post by an0malous »

Next he’ll discover that it’s useful for MCP abilities to be organized by resource and a limited set of actions you could perform on those resources, like getting the resource, posting a new resource, patching an existing resource, or deleting the resource. We’ll call it: Resource Oriented Stateless Transformation MCP or ROST-MCP for short.
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