Live data from Hacker News

Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

apideck.com

61–70 of 149 posts

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#61
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely: "Can you believe they were actually trying to use LLMs for this?"

OSes and software engs did not end up using less RAM.

Measurable responses to the environment lag, Moore's law has been slowing down (e: and demand has been speeding up, a lot).

From just a sustainability point, I really hope that the parent post's quote is true, because otherwise I've personally seen LLMs used over and over to complete the same task that it could have been used for once to generate a script, and I'd really like to be able to still afford to own my own hardware at home.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird trend. I see the appeal of Skills over MCP when you are just a solo dev doing your work. MCP is incredibly useful in an organization context when you need to add controls and process. Both are useful. I feel like the anti-MCP push is coming from people who don't need to work in a large org.

Not sure. Our big org, banned MCPs because they are unsafe, and they have no way to enforce only certain MCPs (in github copilot).

But skills where you tell the LLM to shell out to some random command are safe? I'm not sure I understand the logic.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#65
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine believing humans don’t make the same mistakes. You live in a different universe than me buddy.

Sometimes we repeat mistakes. But humans are capable of occasionally learning. I've seen it!

I've always wanted a better way to test programmers' debugging in an interview setting. Like, sometimes just working problems gets at it, but usually just the "can you re-read your own code and spot a mistake" sort of debugging.

Which is not nothing, and I'm not sure how LLMs do on that style; I'd expect them to be able to fake it well enough on common mistakes in common idioms, which might get you pretty far, and fall flat on novel code.

The kind of debugging that makes me feel cool is when I see or am told about a novel failure in a large program, and my mental model of the system is good enough that this immediately "unlocks" a new understanding of a corner case I hadn't previously considered. "Ah, yes, if this is happening it means that precondition must be false, and we need to change a line of code in a particular file just so." And when it happens and I get it right, there's no better feeling.

Of course, half the time it turns out I'm wrong, and I resort to some combination of printf debugging (to improve my understanding of the code) and "making random changes", where I take swing-and-a-miss after swing-and-a-miss changing things I think could be the problem and testing to see if it works.

And that last thing? I kind of feel like it's all LLMs do when you tell them the code is broken and ask then to fix it. They'll rewrite it, tell you it's fixed and ... maybe it is? It never understands the problem to fix it.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#66

[flagged]

This matches my experience building in-house MCP servers. The mechanism I prefer on load is something like a quick FTS5 with BM25 ranking lookup to find what it needs, and then serve those. I think a lot of these things are implemented pretty naively - for instance, we ran into the huge context problem with Jira, so we just built our own Jira MCP interface that doesn't have all the bloat. If the agent finds it needs something it doesnt have, it can ask again.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#67
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird trend. I see the appeal of Skills over MCP when you are just a solo dev doing your work. MCP is incredibly useful in an organization context when you need to add controls and process. Both are useful. I feel like the anti-MCP push is coming from people who don't need to work in a large org.

Not sure. Our big org, banned MCPs because they are unsafe, and they have no way to enforce only certain MCPs (in github copilot).

We only allow custom MCP servers.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird trend. I see the appeal of Skills over MCP when you are just a solo dev doing your work. MCP is incredibly useful in an organization context when you need to add controls and process. Both are useful. I feel like the anti-MCP push is coming from people who don't need to work in a large org.

> I feel like the anti-MCP push is coming from people who don't need to work in a large org. Any kind of social push like that is always understood to be something to ignore if you understand why you need to ignore it. Do you agree that a typical solo dev caught in the MCP hype should run the other way, even if it is beneficial to your unique situation?

Id agree solo devs can lean toward skills. I liken skills to a sort of bash scripts directory. And for personal stuff I generally use skills only.

Re: Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP

#70
post #44

One of the MCP Core Maintainers here, so take this with a boulder of salt if you're skeptical of my biases. The debate around "MCP vs. CLI" is somewhat pointless to me personally. Use whatever gets the job done. MCP is much more than just tool calling - it also happens to provide a set of consistent rails for an agent to follow. Besides, we as developers often forget that the things we build are also consumed by non-…

> modern MCP clients do smart tool search that obviates the entire "I am sending the full list of tools back and forth" mode of operation

How, "Dynamic Tool Discovery"? Has this been codified anywhere? I've only see somewhat hacky implementations of this idea

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

Or are you talking about the pressure being on the client/harnesses as in,

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

Post reply on HN