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What if you don't need MCP at all?

mariozechner.at

151–160 of 194 posts

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#151
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mcp part is not essential for the actual controlling of the applications. You could “rip out” the mcp functionality and replace it with something else. The only reason why the authors chose mcp is most likely that it was the first and therefore most common plugin interface for llm tools.

Unfortunately, most standards that we end up with are only standard because they're are widely used and not because they are the best or they make the most sense.

It's not even a standard. It's literally not doing anything here. Not only "can" you rip out MCP there is zero technical reason for any of those things to be an "MCP" in the first place.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#152

MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense. "What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!" LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP. Not…

Perhaps you haven't used many MCP server, but those that I have used (GitHub, Atlassian, Glean, BuildKite, Figma, Google Workspace, etc) work very well. They teach an LLM how to do exactly what you're saying - "use the API standards...your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints." Most MCP severs don't sit in between the LLM and the API endpoints, they just teach them how to use the tools and then th…

>, they just teach them how to use the tools and then the LLM calls the APIs directly as any HTTP client would.

No. MCP does not do this. Function & tool calling is built into the LLM. MCP is not augmenting this ability in ANY way.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#153

What I've started experimenting with and will continue to explore is to have project-specific MCP tools. I add MCP tools to tighten the feedback loop. I want my Agent to be able to act autonomously but with a tight set of capabilities that don't often align with off-the-shelf tools. I don't want to YOLO but I also don't want to babysit it for non-value-added, risk-free prompts. So, when I'm developing in go, I create…

Horizontal scaling of remote MCP Servers is something the spec is sadly lacking any recognition around. If you've done work in this space, bravo. I've been using a message bus to decouple the HTTP servers from the MCP request handlers. I'm still evolving the solution, but it's been interesting so far.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's JSON-RPC, with some descriptors. That's not even true. It defines the lifecycle of tool calling. JSON-RPC with some descriptors would have been fine and amazing.

This comment is unhinged. https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/transports/

You linked to one part of the spec and just wanted to ignore everything else? That's fine, but then you wouldn't be obeying the standard and wouldn't be an "MCP."

So, are you agreeing with me?

Respectfully I think I've engaged with you before and you just seem generally confused about nuanced concepts.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>observability Which MCP does the opposite of. It hides information.

How so? The protocol doesn't obfuscate things. Your agent can easily expose the entire MCP conversation, but generally just exposes the call and response. This is no different than any other method of providing a tool for the LLM to call. You have some weird bone to pick with MCP which is making you irrationally unreceptive to any good-faith attempt to help you understand. If you want to expose tools to the LLM you h…

Probably a good read for you to start with: https://raz.sh/blog/2025-05-02_a_critical_look_at_mcp

There are tons of articles detailing the problems if you are genuinely interested.

Notice you couldn't technically point to anything to support your statements, but instead had to revert to religious zealotry and apologetics -- which has no place on this forum.

>be objective about what MCP is and is not meant to do and disconnect what MCP is from how people are currently using (and frequently misusing) MCP.

Please re-read what you wrote.

You wrote all of that just to counter your own stated position, because I think at some fundamental level you realize how non-sense it is.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They have significant data trained on MCP. No they don't lol.

Wild claim. MCP has been popular for well over a year. To filter it out of the training data would be laughable.

Please give this a read before engaging further: https://huggingface.co/docs/hugs/en/guides/function-calling

You're just utilizing your ignorance to yap at this point.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#157
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hate for MCP here is absurd. It's JSON-RPC, with some descriptors. And some comments about OAuth 2. The value is in the consensus. You can make a tool that agents can connect to with no apriori knowledge.

Actually, MCP wastes a lot of tokens when compared to regular tool calling. You might not notice it on more trendy models with large contexts, but for those of us trying to use locked down/local/cheap models it makes very little sense. Also, MCP creates a new problem: providing the model with too much context when trying to combine tools across multiple servers. It works OK with small, very focused servers (like help…

Is that just bad implementation? Where are the wasted tokens?

I noticed your second issue, but to me it's just from bad implementation. For some reason people keep exposing generic overlapping tools from multiple MCP servers.

I don't know that MCP causes this issue, any vendor offering a "tools API" if they shove to many APIs it would bloat things up.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is unhinged. https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/transports/

You linked to one part of the spec and just wanted to ignore everything else? That's fine, but then you wouldn't be obeying the standard and wouldn't be an "MCP." So, are you agreeing with me? Respectfully I think I've engaged with you before and you just seem generally confused about nuanced concepts.

I'm open mindedly hoping you'll be more specific in what about the protocol you find problematic?

The base protocol is just JSON-RPC, and then you have to implement initialize. Everything else is optional.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? The protocol doesn't obfuscate things. Your agent can easily expose the entire MCP conversation, but generally just exposes the call and response. This is no different than any other method of providing a tool for the LLM to call. You have some weird bone to pick with MCP which is making you irrationally unreceptive to any good-faith attempt to help you understand. If you want to expose tools to the LLM you h…

Probably a good read for you to start with: https://raz.sh/blog/2025-05-02_a_critical_look_at_mcp There are tons of articles detailing the problems if you are genuinely interested. Notice you couldn't technically point to anything to support your statements, but instead had to revert to religious zealotry and apologetics -- which has no place on this forum. >be objective about what MCP is and is not meant to do and d…

To get this out of the way, you are an unpleasant person, but that doesn't mean you should be ignored though, so I'll reply.

> you couldn't technically point to anything to support your statements, but instead had to revert to religious zealotry and apologetics

> You wrote all of that just to counter your own stated position, because I think at some fundamental level you realize how non-sense it is.

You need to be specific and not make a blanket assertions like that if you want and honest dialog.

I take particular offense at you claiming "religious zealotry". Nothing in my post is even remotely definable as such. Yes, I use MCP, I also recognize when it's the right tool and when it's not. I don't think MCP is the solution to all problems. I also willingly acknowledge that other tools can fill the same gap. If anyone is being a religious zealot here, it's you and your crusade against MCP.

With your lack of specificity, it's hard to formulate a proper response to whatever you see as lacking in references. I would point out that I haven't see one link in all of your railing against MCP until this very response.

So, let's look at your link.

- I agree that websockets would have been a better choice than SSE+HTTP and StreamableHTTP. Auth for WS is a little bit of a pain from the browser, but it's feasible with some common conventions. - I agree with their characterization of "web seems to be a thing we probably should support" (pretty sure I called that out in my post already... - Their "kind of breaks the Unix/Linux piping paradigm" is laughable though. MCP is hardly the first or only thing to wire a 'server' to and application via stdin/stdout chaining and it's *very* much in the spirit of UNIX (IMHO, as someone working with UNIX systems for the last 30+ years) - Again, I fully agree that the current HTTP transports are... lacking and could use a better solution. - Rant about python aside (I agree BTW), well, they are just ranting actually. Yes, the documentation could use some help. Yes, the wasn't an official Go SDK until recently. - Given this was written a while ago, it's not worth addressing the callous on SSE+HTTP beyond saying, 100% it was a bad design that appears to have been tacked on at the last minute. - The observations about StreamableHTTP are mostly valid. They get a few points wrong, but the essence is right. - Their security concerns are the same ones you'd have with any API, so I'm not sure how this is unique to MCP. - Auth is a bit of a sore subject for me as well. MCP doesn't have an ergonomic workflow for multi-tenant sets and in-band oauth credential management. Again thoug, I don't disagree with the essence of their point.

After meandering they land on "just use stdio and websockets". So the whole rant is around the protocol transport.I agree the transport protocols need some TLC, but you *can* work with them now and new transports are something that's being worked on, even a WS transport.

None of that post talks about the actual protocol behind MCP, how it's succeeding/failing at filling the needs it's meant to address, or any real viable alternative for a standard for linking tools to agents.

If you feel like calling out specific point you feel I should back up with references, I can likely provide them. As with any post, much of the information is synthesized from a lot of places so things like the assertion that remote servers were clearly an afterthought is purely from my reading of the spec and the remote transports code.

Re: What if you don't need MCP at all?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API runs your skills, it's not client side coordinated. You have to replicate the skill-running behavior locally.

Claude just reads the SKILL.md frontmatter into initial context and when the instructions match it reads the rest of the SKILL.md. Every LLM can do that.

If it's such a thing that every model already can support it and you don't need to do anything with it, why is it even a feature?
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