I work for a construction design company, and marking up on PDFs is a very common task, so we use Bluebeam. I've found it's better just to have the agent call the MCP with python or edit the pdf directly, since (at least with Claude) there's no way to pipe data into the MCP directly; the agent has to output everything itself. For this reason alone I feel like command line tools are just the better way forward for most things.
Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
161–170 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#162I'm a tech lead at an AI enablement team in an enterprise setting. There are a few project people have built which eventually turned into functional web apps, but people mostly want to interact with these new capabilities in a Claude or ChatGPT interface. So we eventually had to build an MCP. We are beta testing it right now. You gotta meet your users where they are.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#163I built an MCP server for my voice assistant. By default, Home Assistant offers a few tools to the models, but I felt like it was missing some, so I built it. It has tools to get real jokes, do math, unit conversion, get stock information, search the web with Kagi, and other things I consider to be essential in a voice assistant. It even got approved by my wife. At work I use our MCP server to debug and troubleshoot…
I use MCP for a voice assistant as well. I got a Pebble Index 01 ring and it has support for custom MCP servers. I run one on Tailscale and it can interact with Home Assistant, my home issue tracker, my Anki setup, etc. I've come full circle on MCP. With agents with a shell tool they quickly became unnecessary but these days I've been coming up with more agentic use cases where I don't want to give the agent a shell,…
You just convinced me to buy a Pebble Index, which I was on the fence about. No idea it supported MCP servers.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#164[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too Is that why I have to constantly remind Claude and ChatGPT that they do have access to a Github plugin that can access my account, instead of trying and failing to use the gh cli?
"claude, stop shelling out to grep, your search tool uses ripgrep and it's faster."
0verload.net ... I am the Author if the tool. I cloned grep and hopped it up a with a bunch of globs and stuff only a bot can really use. You can version control directorys ...its not meant to replace git.. I wronte it for my self because I was tired of wishing it hadnt been a week since i checked into github. I have not have regression at all since I started using it ..its a godsend.it increases the effective context size by a huge ammount..if you learn to use it correctly you can have hundreds of megs of context without a problem and share it between agents. Additionally theres an edit monitor that throws every file and the diff for all the things the bots edit and you cvan scroll thru the sessions edits holding alt down and page thru the days code. ITs meant to be a pair programming tool to use with claude code. I have full mcp support but I also have a more powerful scripting language.mcp support is just part of the scripting language..so is rest..the whole thing is bot centric..I have guis for itm all but you can just tell the bots to o stuff ..I made the bot interfaces for everything and then the gui. Oh..it caches all the memory contexts and all the verson controlled filex in ram so grepping stuff in the source controlled folder is considerably faster..anwhere from hundreds to I have seen 6000+ times faster grep results not thru any sort of black magic..its just what happens when a custom written grep has a in ram
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#166MCP's are great for adoption of your service outside of developer circles. Non Technical users can click a link, trigger an OAuth flow and authenticate. You can't do that with API. API still is better for developers using a AI via a CLI but MCP is easier adoption for web or desktop based clients.
This (points up)!
I've read many comments about how good CLIs are, and they are right. But for developers.
For non-tech people, installing the CLI is a hurdle: it involves having the right dependencies installed, controlling how you handle secrets (like API keys), and handling updates (ie. npx with a private registry). But for internal tools, once you create an MCP with OAuth, the installation (in Claude) is straightforward.
I'm surprised how non-tech people in the company use it for ad-hoc integrations, like pulling emails, getting deals from HubSpot, enriching that with the internal MCP, then drafting responses. Of course, this has scaling issues, and at some point it is better to move these everyday automations to a proper system, but I saw how MCP enables what products like Zapier, n8n, or IFTTT try to do: user-friendly ad-hoc integrations.
My only complaint: implementing MCP auth in an MCP server still isn't very streamlined. Some libraries, like Cloudflare MCP, simplify all of that, but AFAIK it's tied to using their services.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#167[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#168MCPs are diminishing in value a bit, because AI Agents are getting smarter about using API/CLIs. For example, I use gh cli via Claude instead of their MCP, because I already had cli setup, so no need to use MCP. MCPs can potentially have great value if they cross multiple sources and combine results. For example at work we use an in-house MCP for log/metrics search across five different (legacy) systems. It finds cor…
The main benefit of MCP today over just giving an agent a CLI is of course that you can be a lot more certain about what the agent can or can't do.
Yes, an agent with CLI access and access to making HTTPS calls is a lot more efficient for most tasks, but also a lot more unpredictable and with much higher blast radius if it starts misbehaving compared to one that only have access to exactly the tools and data sources you want it to use.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#169MCP benefits are way more important than AI rolling their own API client or CLI, after which YOU own the client. MCP is the protocol. If your 3rd-party API doesn't support the API fully in an MCP, that's when you think about rolling your own or writing that 3rd party a stern letter. Stability and security over bespoke client fragility. MCP (or a 3rd party managed CLI) all the way.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
#170MCP benefits (security, stability) outweigh your AI rolling their own API client or CLI, after which YOU/it owns the client. Talk about major technical debt! MCP has a client protocol baked in. If your 3rd party API doesn't support the API fully in their MCP, that's when you think about rolling your own or writing that 3rd party a stern letter. Stability and security over bespoke client fragility. MCP (or a 3rd party managed CLI) all the way.