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What if you don't need MCP at all?

mariozechner.at

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

#31

Post by Schiendelman »

dymk wrote: post #18
moneywoes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the difference between that and those providers exposing an api?

MCP defines the API so vendors of LLM tools like cursor, claude code, codex etc don't all make their own bespoke, custom ways to call tools. The main issue is the disagreement on how to declare the MCP tool exists . Cursor, vscode, claude all use basically the same mcp.json file, but then codex uses `config.toml`. There's very little uniformity in project-specific MCP tools as well, they tend to be defined globally.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't this solved by publishing good API docs, and then pointing the LLM to those docs as a training resource?

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

#32

Post by jes5199 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #20
whoknowsidont wrote: post #15

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…

probably easier to just tell people: You want MCP? Add a "description" field to your rest API that describes how to call it. That's all it's doing. Just plain ole context pollution. World could be better served by continuing to build out the APIs that exist.

yesss, and OpenAI tried this first when they were going to do a “GPT store”. But REST APIs tend to be complicated because they’re supporting apps. MCP, when it works, is very simple functions

in practice it seems like command line tools work better than either of those approaches

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

#34

Post by cadamsdotcom »

You don’t need formal tools. You only need a bash tool that can run shell scripts and cli tools!

Overwhelmed by Sentry errors recently I remembered sentry-cli. I asked the agent to use it to query for unresolved Sentry errors and make a plan that addresses all of them at once. Zeroed out my Sentry inbox in one Claude Code plan. All up it took about an hour.

The agent was capable of sussing out sentry-cli, even running it with --help to understand how to use it.

The same goes for gh, the github cli tool.

So rather than MCPs or function style tools, I highly recommend building custom cli tools (ie. shell scripts), and adding a 10-20 word description of each one in your initial prompt. Add --help capabilities for your agent to use if it gets confused or curious.

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

#35

Post by sshh12 »

IMO MCP isn't totally dead, but its role has shrunk. Quoting from my post [1]:

"Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway... MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way."

You still need some standard to hook up data to agents esp when the agents are not running on your local dev machine. I don't think e.g. REST/etc are nearly specific enough to do this without a more constrained standard for requests.

[1] https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-i-use-every-claude-code-feature

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

#38

Post by _heimdall »

MCP is yet another waste of effort trying to recreate what we had with REST over 20 years ago.

Yes, APIs should be self-documenting. Yes, response data should follow defined schemas that are understandable without deep knowledge of the backend. No, you don't need MCP for this.

I wish Google would have realized, or acknowledged, that XML and proper REST APIs solve both of these use cases rather than killing off XSLT support and presumably helping to coerce the other browsers and WhatWG to do the same.

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

#39

Post by nestorD »

So far I have seen two genuinely good arguments for the use of MCPs:

* They can encapsulate (API) credentials, keeping those out of reach of the model,

* Contrary to APIs, they can change their interface whenever they want and with little consequences.

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

#40

Post by incoming1211 »

Bobaso wrote: post #5

Moderne Ai agent tool have have a setting where you can trimm down the numbers of tools from an MCP server. Usefull to avoid overwhelming the LLM with 80 tools description when you only need 1

Remote MCP with API key which has claims works well to reduce the tool count to only that of what you need.
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