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MCP is a fad

tombedor.dev

31–40 of 129 posts

Re: MCP is a fad

#31
More than a fad, MCP is a reinvention of Smalltalk. Of course an automated agent doesn't want to communicate through other autonomous systems via text or binary protocols. There should be a unified way of executing high-level commands (i.e. message passing) to other systems. A global RPC mechanism, if you will.

MCP is simply a crappy implementation of this idea because our programming environments do not expose global remote function call mechanisms with well-defined protocols. The "everything is a file" idea is quite limiting these days.

Speaking of Smalltalk, I always imagined that you could integrate LLMs/actual artificial intelligence by giving them access to the internal data and telling them what you want to do, rather than calling a method. Instead of:

  a := Point x: 0 y: 0
  b := Point x: 5 y: 7
  distance := a distanceTo: b
You would do:

  a := Point x: 0 y: 0
  b := Point x: 5 y: 7
  distance := a llm: "You are a point object. Please calculate the distance to the argument." arg: b
Wouldn't that be neat? But alas, we're still writing software as if it's the 1970s.

Re: MCP is a fad

#32
post #18

This analysis dismisses MCP by focusing too narrowly on local file system interactions. The real value isn't just running scripts; it's interoperability. MCP allows any client (Claude, Cursor, IDEs) to dynamically discover and interact with any resource (Postgres, Slack) without custom glue code. Comparing it to local scripts is like calling USB a fad because parallel ports worked for printers. The power is standardi…

adding MCP servers isnt free, they take space in your context and if you are working at anything bigger than a startup, none of the companies allow thier workers to connect to other companies' MCPs and they can easily make thier MCP a data exfil machine

Re: MCP is a fad

#33
post #11

Understatement of last year. It was a horrific standard and was a completely broken one security-wise from day 0. The folks who wrote it have never written an RFC or an internet standard before. Remember the VCs screaming about MCPs all day long last year? Well I don't see them doing that at all anymore, and called that 1 year ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43486516

You say "have never written an RFC or an internet standard before" as if that's a disadvantage.

RFCs and IETF Standards are absolute marvels of technical design and writing.

Re: MCP is a fad

#34
post #31

More than a fad, MCP is a reinvention of Smalltalk. Of course an automated agent doesn't want to communicate through other autonomous systems via text or binary protocols. There should be a unified way of executing high-level commands (i.e. message passing) to other systems. A global RPC mechanism, if you will. MCP is simply a crappy implementation of this idea because our programming environments do not expose globa…

For real, and the way half of the MCP servers are, they are just wrapper on top of Rest APIs

Re: MCP is a fad

#35
post #20

MCP is just a small, boring protocol that lets agents call tools in a standard way, nothing more. You can run a single MCP server next to your app, expose a few scripts or APIs, and you are done. There is no requirement for dozens of random servers or a giant plugin zoo. Most of the “overhead” and “security nightmare” worries assume the worst possible setup with zero curation and bad ops. That would be messy with any…

Nah, MCP still has security issues, you can create an MCP server to exfil sensitive data by creating tools which AI at first things are doing something else but then in params you ask it to give sensitive info

Re: MCP is a fad

#38
MCP solves the wrong problem. The mechanics of calling tools, commands, apis, etc. isn't all that hard given some documentation. That's why agentic coding tools work so well.

For security, some sandboxing can address enough concerns that many developers feel comfortable enough using these tools. Also, you have things like version control and CI/CD mechanisms where you can do reviews and manually approve things. Worst case you just don't merge a PR. Or you revert one.

For business usage, the tools are more complicated, state full, dangerous, and mistakes can be costly. Employees are given a lot of powerful tools and are expected to know what to do and not do. E.g. a company credit card can be abused but employees know that would get them in jail and fired. So they moderate what they buy. Likewise they know not to send company secrets by email.

AI tools with the same privileges as employees would be problematic. It's way too easy to trick them into exfiltrating information, doing a lot of damage with expensive resources, etc. This cannot be fixed by a simple permission model. There needs to be something that can figure out what is appropriate to do and not under some defined policy and audit agent behavior. Asking the user for permission every time something needs to happen is not a scalable solution. This needs to be automated. Also, users aren't particularly good at this if it isn't simple. It's way too easy for them to make mistakes answering questions about permissions.

I think that's where the attention will go for a lot of the AI investments. AIs are so useful for coding now that it becomes tempting to see if we can replicate the success of having agents do complex things in different contexts. If the cost savings are significant, it's worth taking some risks even. Just like with coding tools. I run codex with --yolo. In a vm. But still, it could do some damage. But it does some useful stuff for me and the bad stuff is so far theoretical.

I run a small startup, a short cut to success here is taking a development perspective to using business tools. For example instead of using google docs or ms word, use text based file formats like markdown, latex, or whatever and then pandoc to convert them. I've been updating our website this way. It's a static hugo website. I can do all sorts of complicated structure and content updates with codex. That limits my input to providing text and direction. If I was still using wordpress, I'd be stuck and doing all this manually. Which is a great argument to ditch that in a hurry.

I don't necessarily like it writing text though it can be good to have a first shot at a new page. But it's great at putting text in the right place, doing consistency checks, fixing broken layout, restructuring pages, etc. I just asked it to add a partner logo and source the appropriate svg. In the past I would have done that manually. Download some svg. Figure out where to put it. And then fiddle with some files to get it working. Not a huge task but something I no longer have to do manually. Website maintenance has lots of micro tasks like this. I get to focus on the big picture. Having a static site generator and codex fast forwards me a few years in terms of using AI to do complex website updates. Forget about doing any of this with the mainstream web based content management systems any time soon.

Re: MCP is a fad

#39
What do MCPs do that the CLI cannot?

i.e. assuming your agent has access to the terminal, and therefore CLIs, what additional value do MCPs provide?

Re: MCP is a fad

#40
post #11

Understatement of last year. It was a horrific standard and was a completely broken one security-wise from day 0. The folks who wrote it have never written an RFC or an internet standard before. Remember the VCs screaming about MCPs all day long last year? Well I don't see them doing that at all anymore, and called that 1 year ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43486516

We were in the minority fr sure when it was happening. I remember people adding random mcp servers to thier config because it just did one thing they didnt know how to do, and it was and is easy to create MCP server with data exfil loopholes, but they get dismissed by AI companies as "No one is stupid enough to add a random mcp server"

And then the whole MCP server take some part of the context, thus you get less context for your code.

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