Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't also SOAP self described?
And gRPC with reflection, yeah?
and GQL with reflection?
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
81–90 of 366 posts
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#82I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned
Perhaps but we see current hypes like Cursor only using MCP one way; you can feed into Cursor (eg. browser tools), but not out (eg. conversation history, context etc).
I love Cursor but this "not giving back" mentality originally reflected in it's closed source forking of VS Code leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth and I believe will ultimately see it lose developer credibility.
Lock-in still seems to be locked in.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#83I don't want to sound like a skeptic, but I see way more people talking about how awesome MCP is rather than people building cool things with it. Reminds me of blockchain hype. MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.
It's very different to blockchain hype I had similar skepticism initially, but I would recommend you dip toe in water on it before making judgement The conversational/voice AI tech now dropping + the current LLMs + MCP/tools/functions to mix in vendor APIs and private data/services etc. really feels like a new frontier It's not 100% but it's close enough for a lot of usecases now and going to change a lot of ways we…
Probably my judgement is a bit fogged. But if I get asked about building AI into our apps just one more time I am absolutely going to drop my job and switch careers
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#84Lowering the bar to integrate and communicate is what has historically allowed technology to reach critical mass and enabled adoption. MCP is an evolution in that respect and shouldn’t be disregarded. We had a non technical team member write an agent to clean up a file share. There are hundreds of programming languages, libraries, and apis that enabled that before MCP but now people don’t even have to think about it.…
>non technical team member write an agent to clean up a file share
This has to be BS(or you think its true) unless it was like 1000 files. In my entire career I've seen countless crazy file shares that are barely functional chaos. In nearly ever single "cleanup" attempt I've tried to get literally ANYONE from the relevant department to help with little success. That is just for ME to do the work FOR THEM. I just need context from them. I've on countless occasion had to go to senior management to force someone to simply sit with me for an hour to go over the schema they want to try to implement. SO I CAN DO IT FOR THEM and they don't want to do it and literally seemed incapable of doing so when forced to. COUNTLESS Times. This is how I know AI is being shilled HARD.
If this is true then I bet you anything in about 3-6 months you guys are going to be recovering this file system from backups. There is absolutely no way it was done correctly and no one has bothered to notice yet. I'll accept your downvote for now.
Cleaning up a file share is 50% politics, 20% updating procedures, 20% training and 10% technical. I've seen companies go code red and practically grind to a halt over a months long planned file share change. I've seen them rolled back after months of work. I've seen this fracture the files shares into insane duplication(or more) because despite the fact it was coordinated, senior managers did not as much as inform their department(but attended meetings and signed off on things) and now its too late to go back because some departments converted and some did not. I've seen helpdesk staff go home "sick" because they could not take the volume of calls and abuse from angry staff afterwards.
Yes I have trauma on this subject. I will walk out of a job before ever doing a file share reorg again.
You'll roll it out in phases? LOL
You'll run it in parallel? LOL
You'll do some thing? LOL.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
MCP is not REST. In your comparison, its more that MCP is a protocol for discovering REST endpoints at runtime and letting users configure what REST endpoints should be used at runtime. Say i'm building a app and I want my users to be able to play spotify songs. Yea, i'll hit the spotify api. But now, say i've launched my app, and I want my users to be able to play a song from sonofm when they hit play. Alright, now…
HATEOAS was supposed to be that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
heh, there was a good convo about HATEOAS and MCP on HN awhile back:
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember Web 2.0? Remember the semantic web? Remember folksonomies? Mash-ups? The end of information silos? The democratizing power of HTTP APIs?Anyone? Anyone?
I don't understand your point. Some of those things were buzzwords, some were impossible dreams, some changed the way the web works completely. Are you just saying that the future is unknown?
No. What they are saying is best said with a quote from Battlestar Galactica:
> All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier. If you’re younger, and you’re genuinely excited about MCP for the potential explosion in interop, hit me up for a bulk discount on napkins.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#87Where do I get started with MCP? I’m all in, but kinda…confused? A REST API makes sense to me…but this is apparently significantly different and more useful. What’s the best way to think about MCP compared to a traditional API? Where do I get started building one? Are there good examples to look at?
I think I'm living in a parallel universe. You can tell an LLM in a million ways what "tools" it can "call". Anthropic & co standardized a shitty variant so they have an uniform way of letting others play in their sandbox, until they invariably decide which of these things make sense and then usurp them in a desperate way out of the commodity rat race to the bottom.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#88So much scepticism in the comments. I spent last week implementing an MCP server and I must say that "well-designed" is probably an overstatement. One of the principles behind MCP is that "an MCP server should be very easy to implement". I don't know, maybe it's a skill issue but it's not that easy at all. But what is important imo, is that so many eyes are looking in one direction right now. That means, it has good…
We've done it before, it hasn't worked before and it's only a matter of years if not months before apps starting locking down the endpoints so ONLY chatgpt/claude/etc. servers can use them.
Interoperability means user portability. And no tech bro firm wants user portability, they want lock in and monopoly.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#89I agree with the article, and I love how the author is (mis-)using MCP. I just want to rephrase what the accident actually is. The accident isn't that somehow we got a protocol to do things we couldn't do before. As other comments point out MCP (the specificaiton), isn't anything new or interesting. No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned. I don't know h…
The main benefit is not that it made interoperability fashionable, or that it make things easy to interconnect. It is the LLM itself, if it knows how to wield tools. It's like you build a backend and the front-end is not your job anymore, AI does it.
In my experience Claude and Gemini can take over tool use and all we need to do is tell them the goal. This is huge, we always had to specify the steps to achieve anything on a computer before. Writing a fixed program to deal with dynamic process is hard, while a LLM can adapt on the fly.
Re: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
#90So much scepticism in the comments. I spent last week implementing an MCP server and I must say that "well-designed" is probably an overstatement. One of the principles behind MCP is that "an MCP server should be very easy to implement". I don't know, maybe it's a skill issue but it's not that easy at all. But what is important imo, is that so many eyes are looking in one direction right now. That means, it has good…
> One of the principles behind MCP is that "an MCP server should be very easy to implement".
I’m not familiar with the details but I would imagine that it’s more like:
”An MCP server which re-exposes an existing public/semi-public API should be easy to implement, with as few changes as possible to the original endpoint”
At least that’s the only way I can imagine getting traction.