Being able to plug MCPs into my desktop Claude app has been awesome. I gave it a K/V store and access to my project folder and it uses the tools very well with minimal guidance.

Today there's no way I can talk an average person into getting MCP working without them having to modify some config files hidden away somewhere.

I would bet big money that as soon as Claude and ChatGPT add 1 click "app store" experiences everyone will be using them in a week.

It is not easy to "just" use an API as a human, plus a lot of APIs force you to deal with tokens and storing+executing code. In some cases it's easier for the LLM to simply fetch or curl basic APIs directly than waste context tokens on the overhead of an MCP tool call (e.g. all these weather tool examples), but with MCP consistency is much better, so depending on the use case MCP vs API both have advantages.

Since my comment is already pretty long: LLM+RSS+Fetch is a killer combination for me, and it's almost all off the shelf these days. Once I add an RSS merge tool I think it will be an excellent way to consume content.

I’m not reading thru all that, but believe me when I say the ground truth is that IBM developed REXX on its mainframes and a genius guy from that world (poor bstrd) recreated it on Amiga as a third-party product called ARexx that was, in turn, adopted and promoted by CBM Dev Relations. One of the things the fake frenching innovation team in charge of Apple for a few years did was go down in the basement where they had an Amiga in various forms of dissection and transplanted ARexx out of it, mixed with HyperCard’s vocab (which they also didn’t invent) and announced to the World their great invention: AppleScript. But I digress. Here in the (dystopian) Future, some Apple operating systems are just now gaining the kind of power that ARexx had, because these types of systems require the cooperation of the developers and they had little incentive to “donate” functions to the system just to gain integration with Siri/Shortcuts, but they can get fired/bankrupted for not doing it to integrate with Apple Intelligence (I know, I hate that identifier too). ARexx could not be ported to MacOS back in the day because it would have had to have been championed by Apple Developer Relations (Guy Kawasaki & Co —did I just wreck the “Hackers” movie reference?) and, even/especially in the 80s, they wouldn’t have approved a tech that “competed” with AppleScript. Microsoft didn’t jump on this because it descends from DEC tech (under the direction of the Cutler) which had nothing like REXX.

Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though

Anthropic's example of creating an MCP server is just wrapping MCP around a REST weather forecasting service.

Maybe it's just that agentic LLMs have created a lot of interest in being interoperable, whereas efforts like Open API just didn't have any carrot to warrant the stick other than "wouldn't it be nice".

And then a few steps later it's just bots talking to bots. Then what did we read when we're on the loo?