Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

worksonmymachine.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 366 posts

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#101

Post by mtkd »

moooo99 wrote: post #83
mtkd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very different to blockchain hype I had similar skepticism initially, but I would recommend you dip toe in water on it before making judgement The conversational/voice AI tech now dropping + the current LLMs + MCP/tools/functions to mix in vendor APIs and private data/services etc. really feels like a new frontier It's not 100% but it's close enough for a lot of usecases now and going to change a lot of ways we…

Probably my judgement is a bit fogged. But if I get asked about building AI into our apps just one more time I am absolutely going to drop my job and switch careers

That's likely because OG devs have been seeing the hallucination stuff, unpredicability etc. and questioning how that fits with their carefully curated perfect system

What blocked me initially was watching NDA'd demos a year or two back from a couple of big software vendors on how Agents were going to transform enterprise ... what they were showing was a complete non-starter to anyone who had worked in a corporate because of security, compliance, HR, silos etc. so I dismissed it

This MCP stuff solves that, it gives you (the enterprise) control in your own walled garden, whilst getting the gains from LLMs, voice etc. ... the sum of the parts is massive

It more likely wraps existing apps than integrates directly with them, the legacy systems becoming data or function providers (I know you've heard that before ... but so far this feels different when you work with it)

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#102

Post by bwfan123 »

klabb3 wrote: post #86
karaterobot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point. Some of those things were buzzwords, some were impossible dreams, some changed the way the web works completely. Are you just saying that the future is unknown?

No. What they are saying is best said with a quote from Battlestar Galactica: > All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. ”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier.…

And then, there are "architecture astronaut"s dreaming of an entire internet of MCP speaking devices - an "internet of agents" if you will. That is now requiring a separate DNS, SMTP, BGP etc. for that internet.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#104

Post by TZubiri »

>What if it's just "a standardized way to connect AI models literally anything to different data sources and tools"?

Then you aren't exploring a novel concept, and you are better served learning about historical ways this challenge has been attempted rather than thinking it's the first time.

Unix pipes? APIs? POSIX? Json? The list is endless, this is one of the requirements that you can identify as just being a basic one of computers. Another example is anything that is about storing and remembering information. If it's so foundational, there will be tools and protocols to deal with this since the 70s.

For the love of god, before diving into the trendy new thing, learn about he boring old things.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#105

Post by bwfan123 »

mtkd wrote: post #101
moooo99 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably my judgement is a bit fogged. But if I get asked about building AI into our apps just one more time I am absolutely going to drop my job and switch careers

That's likely because OG devs have been seeing the hallucination stuff, unpredicability etc. and questioning how that fits with their carefully curated perfect system What blocked me initially was watching NDA'd demos a year or two back from a couple of big software vendors on how Agents were going to transform enterprise ... what they were showing was a complete non-starter to anyone who had worked in a corporate be…

There are 2 kinds of usecases that software automates. 1) those that require accuracy and 2) those that dont (social media, ads, recommendations).

Further, there are 2 kinds of users that consume the output of software. a) humans, and b) machines.

Where LLMs shine are in the 2a usecases, ie, usecases where accuracy does not matter and humans are end-users. there are plenty of these usecases.

The problem is that LLMs are being applied to 1a, 1b usecases where there is going to be a lot of frustration.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#107

Post by TZubiri »

jadar wrote: post #4

I don’t want to undermine the author’s enthusiasm for the universality of the MCP. But part of me can’t help wondering: isn’t this the idea of APIs in general? Replace MCP with REST and does that really change anything in the article? Or even an Operating System API? POSIX, anyone? Programs? Unix pipes? Yes, MCP is far simpler/universal than any of those things ended up being — but maybe the solution is to build simp…

Damn, I just read this and it's comforting to see how similar it is to my own response.

To elaborate on this, I don't know much about MCP, but usually when people speak about it is in a buzzword-seeking kind of way, and the people that are interested in it make these kinds of conceptual snafus.

Second, and this applies not just to MCP, but even things like JSON, Rust, MongoDB. There's this phenomenon where people learn the complex stuff before learning the basics. It's not the first time I've cited this video on Homer studying marketing where he reads the books out of order https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BT7_owW2sU . It makes sense that this mistake is so common, the amount of literature and resources is like an inverted pyramid, there's so little classical foundations and A LOT of new stuff, most of which will not stand the test of time. Typically you have universities to lead the way and establish a classical corpus and path, but being such a young discipline, 70 years in and we are still not finding much stability, Universities have gone from teaching C, to teaching Java, to teaching Python (at least in intro to CS), maybe they will teach Rust next, but this buzzwording seems more in line with trying to predict the future, and there will be way more losers than winners in that realm. And the winners will have learned the classicals in addition to the new technology, learning the new stuff without the classics is a recipe for disaster.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#108

Post by TZubiri »

jampa wrote: post #10

I don't want to sound like a skeptic, but I see way more people talking about how awesome MCP is rather than people building cool things with it. Reminds me of blockchain hype. MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.

I wasn't able to find a good source on it, but I read a couple of times that Anthropic (builders of MCP) do astroturfing/shilling/growth hacking/SEO/organic advertisement. Everything I've read so far with MCP and Claude and the hype I see on social media is consistent with that, hype and no value.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#109

Post by jaredsohn »

Jonovono wrote: post #21
jadar wrote: post #4

I don’t want to undermine the author’s enthusiasm for the universality of the MCP. But part of me can’t help wondering: isn’t this the idea of APIs in general? Replace MCP with REST and does that really change anything in the article? Or even an Operating System API? POSIX, anyone? Programs? Unix pipes? Yes, MCP is far simpler/universal than any of those things ended up being — but maybe the solution is to build simp…

MCP is not REST. In your comparison, its more that MCP is a protocol for discovering REST endpoints at runtime and letting users configure what REST endpoints should be used at runtime. Say i'm building a app and I want my users to be able to play spotify songs. Yea, i'll hit the spotify api. But now, say i've launched my app, and I want my users to be able to play a song from sonofm when they hit play. Alright, now…

Feels like segment.com but for calling APIs rather than adding libraries to the frontend.

Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

#110

Post by mtkd »

bwfan123 wrote: post #105
mtkd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's likely because OG devs have been seeing the hallucination stuff, unpredicability etc. and questioning how that fits with their carefully curated perfect system What blocked me initially was watching NDA'd demos a year or two back from a couple of big software vendors on how Agents were going to transform enterprise ... what they were showing was a complete non-starter to anyone who had worked in a corporate be…

There are 2 kinds of usecases that software automates. 1) those that require accuracy and 2) those that dont (social media, ads, recommendations). Further, there are 2 kinds of users that consume the output of software. a) humans, and b) machines. Where LLMs shine are in the 2a usecases, ie, usecases where accuracy does not matter and humans are end-users. there are plenty of these usecases. The problem is that LLMs…

https://www.withriviera.com/
Post reply on HN