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Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

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Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#41
post #25

MCP everywhere is going to be such a societal changer. Once your bank and credit cards get MCP servers, that's it. It's next level society. Like, immediately, I want it to order me some groceries based on what it sees in my fridge and what I cook. And to remind me to change my air filters. Or book my vacation for me, knowing I like a mediterranean vibe and Bistecco Florentine. I am absolutely excited for all of this.…

> It's next level society. Like, immediately, I want it to order me some groceries based on what it sees in my fridge and what I cook. And to remind me to change my air filters. Or book my vacation for me, knowing I like a mediterranean vibe and Bistecco Florentine. This thing already exists though, it’s called a personal assistant. And since you’re already not willing to spend $400 a month on getting one, likely rev…

Just like ACs, fridges, washing machines, internet and a bunch of other things are "made-up preferences" too. In the end, does it really matter why or how the preference appears? If people are willing to have a personal assistant for 100/month, rather than 400/month, what difference does it make to you? Because you didn't get it at 400/month, you shouldn't want to get it at any price, because you don't really need it?

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#42
post #33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For speeding up chores it can be useful but removing the actual fun part of experiences, the research, the looking into, the figuring out, to instead only get the result of it sounds like a quick path into unfulfilling experiences. But to be honest, I don't think it will get to the state you dream about, just like smart homes never got close and are more of a hassle than an actual life improvement. Unless it is almos…

Yah I definitely want to be fulfilled by having to pick a health insurance plan or a car rental reservation. Seriously, every little annoying thing in life is going to be automated, so you get to free yourself to do the things you really want to do.

> Yah I definitely want to be fulfilled by having to pick a health insurance plan or a car rental reservation.

Where did I not include "health insurance plan" as a chore, exactly? Do not strawman what I said, please.

My point was towards this:

> Or book my vacation for me, knowing I like a mediterranean vibe and Bistecco Florentine.

A lot of the fun I have with my vacation is doing the research, learning the place, finding about spots that aren't the beaten path to check out (including restaurants, cheap eats, bars, etc.). Automating that would remove the fun of figuring out what I want to see at the places I'm going to, it's a braindead way of vacationing, completely understand it's the case for some people but it's not at all fulfilling to me to have that designed by some digital parrot.

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not hallucinate yours to zero, or mine, or franks, or Mary's, but at some point it will do it to someone. That's the issue I have with these approaches *at scale*. I'm sure one day we'll get 100.00% reliable outputs such that autonomous agents can do this, however that's not today.

The way this is done at scale is legalized front-running. You buy order flow from "free" retail brokers like Robin Hood (as a market maker) and then literally front run ALL trades. You then tell everybody you're giving them the best price (also the only price), lol. In other words: legalized crime.

You need microsecond latency for HFT, certainly not enough time to consult an LLM

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not hallucinate yours to zero, or mine, or franks, or Mary's, but at some point it will do it to someone. That's the issue I have with these approaches *at scale*. I'm sure one day we'll get 100.00% reliable outputs such that autonomous agents can do this, however that's not today.

The way this is done at scale is legalized front-running. You buy order flow from "free" retail brokers like Robin Hood (as a market maker) and then literally front run ALL trades. You then tell everybody you're giving them the best price (also the only price), lol. In other words: legalized crime.

What does this mean? Sorry, not up on stock lingo. Is this effectively like having the results of a race a minute early or something?

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#45
I’m trying to wrap my head around mcp but auth and security is still the confusing thing to me. In this case, I get there is an oauth redirect happening, but where is the token being stored? How would that work in an enterprise or saas environment where you want to expose an mcp for users but ensure they can only get “their” data? How does the LLm reliably tell the mcp who the current user is?

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#46
I think many firms already have (faster) 'sentiment' tools that parse news messages and automatically trade on those. I don't think a LLM can compete on speed which such tools.

But a LLM could build a knowledge graph that parses niche news messages and tries to understand the entire picture and make bigger predictions.

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Go, but Typescript/Javascript really seem like the ideal languages for dealing with JSON.

Well, the JS in the name is for JavaScript :)

Yeah, although I'm surprised that not more languages have designed data interaction to be more JSON like. In JS it just feels like I'm interacting with JSON directly. Most other languages have some layer of "weirdness"/indirection between the language runtime and the data.

Like in Go I have to define field names twice. Once for the Go field and once for the field name in the actual JSON structure. Not even Python allows for copy-paste-able json. I have to do a bunch of syntax corrections for it to work.

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#48

I’m trying to wrap my head around mcp but auth and security is still the confusing thing to me. In this case, I get there is an oauth redirect happening, but where is the token being stored? How would that work in an enterprise or saas environment where you want to expose an mcp for users but ensure they can only get “their” data? How does the LLm reliably tell the mcp who the current user is?

It does an oauth redirect flow and the client stores the access token and sends it with requests after.

I have built a couple using the spec from a month ago. It works alright.

A lot of bad decisions are in the official implementations. For instance not using native Request / Response types in node, so you’re forced to write a bunch of garbage code to convert it, or install express just to use an mcp server.

If I had the time I’d really make my own mcp implementation in typescript at least.

I find most of the implementations to be so over engineered and abstracted on what could be simple function calls on top of the built in language

For simple stuff like a json file that returns the location of your auth routes, you need to add a “middleware”

When in reality you can just make a route and explicitly return that information.

Every piece is some new abstraction it feels vibe coded.

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#49
post #48

I’m trying to wrap my head around mcp but auth and security is still the confusing thing to me. In this case, I get there is an oauth redirect happening, but where is the token being stored? How would that work in an enterprise or saas environment where you want to expose an mcp for users but ensure they can only get “their” data? How does the LLm reliably tell the mcp who the current user is?

It does an oauth redirect flow and the client stores the access token and sends it with requests after. I have built a couple using the spec from a month ago. It works alright. A lot of bad decisions are in the official implementations. For instance not using native Request / Response types in node, so you’re forced to write a bunch of garbage code to convert it, or install express just to use an mcp server. If I had…

You answer is just about a discussion we had yesterday about the race between 'let build a standard that will allow the LLM to get programmatic decisions' and 'let build something that works'

Most of the standard and implementation is focused in the vision of models and clients that automatically handle the tool overhead, while in reality everything that is related to MCP requires tons of boilerplate/middleware/garbage code.

Re: Trading with Claude, and writing your own MCP server

#50
post #42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah I definitely want to be fulfilled by having to pick a health insurance plan or a car rental reservation. Seriously, every little annoying thing in life is going to be automated, so you get to free yourself to do the things you really want to do.

> Yah I definitely want to be fulfilled by having to pick a health insurance plan or a car rental reservation. Where did I not include "health insurance plan" as a chore, exactly? Do not strawman what I said, please. My point was towards this: > Or book my vacation for me, knowing I like a mediterranean vibe and Bistecco Florentine. A lot of the fun I have with my vacation is doing the research, learning the place, f…

You will still be able to do all of that, will you not? But if one would rather not to, they have the option.

If I’ve been to Paris a hundreds times, I don’t need to do any research, just want the same hotel or a comparable hotel in a comparable neighborhood to where I stayed in my last visit. That I can delegate to AI.

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