11–20 of 96 posts
"“MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs, what’s the problem?”" We are already off to a wrong start, context has a meaning specific to LLMs, everyone who works with LLMs knows what it means: the context is the text that is fed as input at runtime to LLM, including the current message (user prompt) as well as the previous messages and responses by the LLM. So we don't need t…
Agent LLMs are able to retrieve additional context and MCP servers give them specific, targeted tools to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or... it's a tool to expose APIs to LLMs.
functions that an LLM can use in its reasoning are called "tools", so the prior is probably more correct in the sense that an API can be used to provide the LLM tools
For anyone confused, you can play with mcp for free on usetexture.com
I feel like I need the opposite, a cursory view, or at least a definition. Most of the material on MCP is either too specific or too in depth. WTF is it?! (Other than a dependency by Anthropic)
You write a wrapper ("MCP server") over your docs/apis/databases/sites/scripts that exposes certain commands ("tools"), and you can instruct models to query your wrapper with these commands ("calling/invoking tools") and expect responses in a certain format that they can then use.
That is it.
Why vibe-coded? Because instead of bi-directional websockets the protocol uses unidirectional server-side events, so you need to send requests to a separate endpoint and then listen to the SSE hoping for an answer. There's also non-existent authentication.
I feel like I need the opposite, a cursory view, or at least a definition. Most of the material on MCP is either too specific or too in depth. WTF is it?! (Other than a dependency by Anthropic)
Conversely, it allows many different LLMs to get context via many different Applications using a standard prodocol.
It addresses an m*n problem.
I feel like I need the opposite, a cursory view, or at least a definition. Most of the material on MCP is either too specific or too in depth. WTF is it?! (Other than a dependency by Anthropic)
It's an API to expose tools to LLMs.
Yeah MCP is the worst documented technology I have ever encountered. I understand APIs for calling LLMs, I understand tool calling APIs. Yet I have read so much about MCP and have zero fucking clue except vague marketing speak. Or code that has zero explanation. What an amateur effort.
I've given up, I don't care about MCP. I'll use tool calling APIs as I currently do.
I feel like I need the opposite, a cursory view, or at least a definition. Most of the material on MCP is either too specific or too in depth. WTF is it?! (Other than a dependency by Anthropic)
that's the missing piece in most of these description.
You send off a description of the tools, the model decides if it wants to use one, then you run it with the args, send it back to the context and loop.