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Model Context Protocol

anthropic.com

251–260 of 283 posts

Re: Model Context Protocol

#251

I see a good number of comments that seem skeptical or confused about what's going on here or what the value is. One thing that some people may not realize is that right now there's a MASSIVE amount of effort duplication around developing something that could maybe end up looking like MCP. Everyone building an LLM agent (or pseudo-agent, or whatever) right now is writing a bunch of boilerplate for mapping between mes…

I don't see I or any other developer would abandon their homebrew agent implementation for a "standard" which isn't actually a standard yet.

I also don't see any of that implementation as "boilerplate". Yes there's a lot of similar code being written right now but that's healthy co-evolution. If you have a look at the codebases for Langchain and other LLM toolkits you will realize that it's a smarter bet to just roll your own for now.

You've definitely identified the main hurdle facing LLM integration right now and it most definitely isn't a lack of standards. The issue is that the quality of raw LLM responses falls apart in pretty embarrassing ways. It's understood by now that better prompts cannot solve these problems. You need other error-checking systems as part of your pipeline.

The AI companies are interested in solving these problems but they're unable to. Probably because their business model works best if their system is just marginally better than their competitor.

Re: Model Context Protocol

#252

I took time to read everything on Twitter/Reddit/Documentation about this. I think I have a complete picture. Here is a quickstart for anyone who is just getting into it. https://glama.ai/blog/2024-11-25-model-context-protocol-quic...

[deleted]

Re: Model Context Protocol

#253
Moving from langchain interop to protocol interop for tools is great

Curious:

1. Authentication and authorization is left as a TODO: what is the thinking, as that is necessary for most use?

2. Ultimately, what does MCP already add or will add that makes it more relevant than OpenApI / a pattern on top?

Re: Model Context Protocol

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read through several of the top level pages, then SQLite, but still had no idea what was meant by "context" as it's a highly ambiguous word and is never mentioned with any concrete definition, example, or scope of capability that it is meant to imply. After reading the Python server tutorial, it looks like there is some tool calling going on, in the old terminology. That makes more sense. But none of the examples s…

Thank you. That’s good feedback. The gist of it is: you have an llm application such as Claude desktop. You want to have it interact (read or write) with some system you have. MCP solves this. For example you can give the application the database schema as a “resource”, effectively saying; here is a bunch of text, do whatever you want with it during my chat with the llm. Or you can give the application a tool such as…

Great work on the protocol!! I am looking for some examples of creating my own custom client with the Anthropic API leveraging MCP, but I could not find any. Pretty much want to understand how Claude Desktop is integrating with MCP Server along with Anthropic API Can you provide some pointers about the integration? e.g.

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

response = client.messages.create( model="claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022", max_tokens=1024, [mcp_server]=... ## etc.? ... )

Re: Model Context Protocol

#256

@jspahrsummers and I have been working on this for the last few months at Anthropic. I am happy to answer any questions people might have.

Hi,

this is really cool stuff. I just started to write a server and I have a few questions. Not sure if HN is the right place, so where would you suggest to ask them?

Anyway, if there is no place yet, my questions are:

- In the example https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/first-server/python , what is the difference between read_resources and call_tool. In both cases the call the fetch_weather function. Would be nice to have that explained better. I implemented in my own server only the call_tool function and Claude seems to be able to call it.

- Where is inputSchema of Tool specified in the docs? It would be nice if inputSchema would be explained a bit better. For instance how can I make a list of strings field that has a default value.

- How can i view the output of logger? It would be nice to see somewhere an example on how to check the logs. I log some stuff with logger.info and logger.error but I have no clue where I can actually look at it. My work around now is to log to a local file and tail if..

General feedback

- PLEASE add either automatic reload of server (hard) or a reload button in the app (probably easier). Its really disrupting to the flow when you have ot restart the app on any change.

- Claude Haiku never calls the tools. It just tells me it can't do it. Sonnet can do it but is really slow.

- The docs are really really version 0.1 obviously :-) Please put some focus on it...

Overall, awesome work!

Thanks

Re: Model Context Protocol

#257

Awesome! In the "Protocol Handshake" section of what's happening under the hood - it would be great to have more info on what's actually happening. For example, more details on what's actually happening to translate the natural language to a DB query. How much config do I need to do for this to work? What if the queries it makes are inefficient/wrong and my database gets hammered - can I customise them? How do I ensu…

One thing I am having a hard time wrapping my head around is how to reliably integrate business logic into a system like this. Just hook up my Rails models etc. and have it use those? Let’s say I’ve got a “widgets” table and I want the system to tell me how many “deprecated widgets” there are, but there is no convenient “deprecated” flag on the table—it’s defined as a Rails scope on the model or something (business l…

Sounds like you may want an MCP server for your Rails API instead of connecting directly to db.

Re: Model Context Protocol

#259
post #78

This is awesome. I have an assistant that I develop for my personal use and integrations are the more difficult part - this is a game changer. Now let's see a similar abstraction on the client side - a unified way of connecting your assistant to Slack, Discord, Telegram, etc.

Building something for this at surferprotocol [dot] org. Imo not every company will expose API's for easily exporting data from their platforms (linkedin, imessage, etc), so devs have to build these themselves

Re: Model Context Protocol

#260

@jspahrsummers and I have been working on this for the last few months at Anthropic. I am happy to answer any questions people might have.

Great work!

I'm looking at a PostgreSQL integration here: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...

I have a case in mind where I would like to connect to multiple databases. Does the integration endpoint specification in claude_desktop_config.json allow us to pass some description so as to differentiate different databases? How?

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