> Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. That analogy may be helpful for mom, but not for me as a software engineer.
Thinking in terms of MCP, will change your thought process to design your application in different way.
OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
161–170 of 281 posts
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#162I hoped OpenAI would support OpenAPI for connecting to tools. Having created a couple of MCP servers, it feels like a less flexible and worse documented API to me. I can’t really see anything that is made better by MCP over OpenAPI. It’s a little bit less code for a lot less options. Give it some time and it will also get Swagger built in. It’s solving a problem that was already robustly solved. So get we go with ano…
> I can’t really see anything that is made better by MCP over OpenAPI Well it’s transport agnostic, for one. I think a big part of it is defining a stateful connection and codifying the concepts of prompts and tools. Another issue with OpenAPI / swagger is that you still need to create a client per API, but with MCP it’s all uniform.
I feel like we should have transport agnostic RPC by now, GRPC?
And MCP is stateless too.
And you don't have to create a client per API, it's up to implementation.
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this just the same paradigm as plugins?
Similar, but one level higher. Plugins have pre-defined APIs. You code your application against the plugin API and plugin developers do the same. Functionality is being consumed directly through this API — this is level 1. MCP is a meta-protocol. Think of it as an API that lets arbitrary plugins announce their APIs to the application at runtime. MCP thus lives one level above the plugin's API level. MCP is just used…
I really enjoyed both your blog posts. You've clearly thought about this a lot and explained things well. I'd love to subscribe to be updated on your next post (even if it's not for months/years). Any chance you could add an RSS feed to your blog?
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#164Today MCP added Streamable HTTP [0] which is a huge step forward as it doesn't require an "always-on" connection to remote HTTP servers. However, if you look at the specification it's clear bringing the LSP-style paradigm to remote HTTP servers is adding a bunch of extra complexity. This is a tool call, for example: { "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 2, "method": "tools/call", "params": { "name": "get_weather", "arguments": {…
Maybe MCP was developed with AI.
LLMs tend to be overly verbose
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#165[deleted]
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#166Call it a protocol and suddenly it sounds like a foundational technology.
Nah, it's just a fancy JSON schema that lets LLMs play hot potato with metadata.
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#167I am really struggling with what the value-add is with MCP. It feels like another distraction in the shell game of contemporary AI tech. > MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. What is there to standardize? Last I checked, we are using a text-to-text transformer that operates on arbitrary, tokenized strings. Anything that seems fancier than tokens-to-tokens is an illusion…
Well, you should check again, because it hasn't been text to text for a while. There are multimodal models now.
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#168MCP is great. But what i'd like to understand is whats the difference between MCP and manually prompting the model a list of tools with description and calling the specific function based on the llm response ?
1. it makes tool discovery and use happen elsewhere so programs become more portable 2. it standardizes the method so every LLM doesn't need to do it differently 3. it creates a space for further shared development beyond tool use and discovery 4. it begins to open up hosted tool usage across LLMs for publicly hosted tools 5. for better or worse, it continues to drive the opinion that 'everything is a tool' so that e…
Great breakdown, appreciate it.
I think most of the hype around MCP is just excitement that tool use can actually work and seeing lots of little examples where it does.
Watching Claude build something in Blender was pure magic, even if it is rough around the edges.
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. I know I’m in the “get off my lawn” phase of my career when I see things like MCP and LangChain, but know I would have been excited about them earlier in my career.
LangChain is an objectively terrible Frankenstein's monster of an API. If you were a good developer in your youth, you'd have still held it in contempt, and treat MCP with caution. The MCP API is pretty bad, too, it's just that a paradigm is starting to emege regarding modularity, integration and agentic tooling, and MCP happens to be the only real shot in that direction st this particular moment.
Could you elaborate on your issues with LangChain?
We're kinda headed towards using it as it seems to be a flexible enough abstraction that is relatively stable to work with, so I'd like to know if I'm overlooking something..?
Re: OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
LangChain is an objectively terrible Frankenstein's monster of an API. If you were a good developer in your youth, you'd have still held it in contempt, and treat MCP with caution. The MCP API is pretty bad, too, it's just that a paradigm is starting to emege regarding modularity, integration and agentic tooling, and MCP happens to be the only real shot in that direction st this particular moment.
Could you elaborate on your issues with LangChain? We're kinda headed towards using it as it seems to be a flexible enough abstraction that is relatively stable to work with, so I'd like to know if I'm overlooking something..?
A lot of folks use it to get started quickly and then realize the unnecessary abstractions are obfuscating the actual hard parts.