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Posted by Stwerner 3 days ago

MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System(worksonmymachine.substack.com)
791 points | 346 commentspage 4
tankenmate 2 days ago|
"Want your AI agents to respond like peons from Warcraft 3 when you assign them a task?" -- I'd rather be sailing.
falcor84 2 days ago|
That's from Warcraft 2, right? I think in Warcraft 3 it's "I'd rather be flying"
zzo38computer 2 days ago||
Although it has a benefit that it is possible to use like that (e.g. in case you do not have a better system), I think it isn't the best way to do. USB, HTTP, MCP, etc have many problems, despite whatever benefit they may have (including unintentional ones).
vaxman 2 days ago||
> The protocol doesn't judge your life choices. This brings me to something I discovered about MCP (Model Context Protocol) while trying to make my calendar app order takeout. Stay with me here.

What was that character in “South Park” that has a hand puppet? (White noise, flatline sound)

spauldo 2 days ago||
There's a reason no one uses cigarette lighters in cars anymore. If you actually try to use a cigarette lighter in a modern car, you'll likely melt your dashboard. They don't make them for that purpose anymore.
iambateman 3 days ago||
Where 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?

randomcatuser 3 days ago||
Yeah, one way to think about it is like... protocols restrict things, so that people can expect the same stuff.

With a traditional API, people can build it any way they want, which means you (the client) need API docs.

With MCP, you literally restrict it to 2 things: get the list of tools, and call the tool (using the schema you got above). Thus the key insight is just about: let's add 1 more endpoint that lists the APIs you have, so that robots can find it.

Example time: - Build an MCP server (equivalent of "intro to flask 101"): https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/guides/remote-mcp-s... - Now you can add it to Claude Desktop/Cursor and see what it does - That's as far as i got lol

ashwinsundar 3 days ago|||
Start by reading the documentation - https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction

Then use FastMCP to write an MCP server in Python - https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp

Finally, hook it up to an LLM client. It’s dead simple to do in Claude Code, create an .mcp.json file and define the server’s startup command.

stefan_ 3 days ago|||
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.
Rury 2 days ago|||
Do you know WSDL? If you do, it's kind of the same concept behind consuming WSDL, just for AI applications...
airstrike 3 days ago|||
It's kinda like a REST API in which the schema tags along with the requests.

The use case in AI is sort of reversed such that the code runs on your computer

namtab00 2 days ago||
it's not a recipe, but I found this sufficiently interesting, at least for grasping the conceptual differences.

https://youtu.be/eeOANluSqAE

nimish 3 days ago||
Interoperability is, and always was, the hardest part of programming systems together. It's telling that the ai tooling needed sustained non ai effort to expose the interfaces via MCP (or ws-* or rest or an enterprise service bus or xml or CORBA or EJB or...)
chopete3 3 days ago||
The real accident is that the prompts became a programming language. I don't think the ML Engineers set out to create a general purpose programming language.

A2A (agent 2 agent) mechanism is an another accidental discovery for the interoperability across agent boundaries

namtab00 2 days ago|
"The hottest new programming language is English" - Karpathy

I call bullshit, mainly because any natural language is ambiguous at best, and incomplete at worst.

tamersalama 2 days ago||
I love the article & the protocol. However, MCP reminded me (somewhat) of microservices & SOA. Are we creating failure vectors nightmare? Or, is it, because of agents, we can gracefully increase reliability?
roenxi 3 days ago||
... MCP is almost literally just a JSON schema and a "yo, this stuff exists" for AI. It is great to have it standardised and we're all very thankful not to be using XML but there just isn't that much there.

MCP is fulfilling the promise of AI agents being able to do their own thing. None of this is unintended, unforeseen or particularly dependent on the existence of MCP. It is exciting, the fact that AI has this capability captures the dawn of a new era. But the important thing in the picture isn't MCP - it is the power of the models themselves.

layer8 3 days ago|
XML actually works better with LLMs than JSON.
zahlman 3 days ago||
Why?
layer8 2 days ago||
Presumably because XML tags give better context. You have closing tags, and each array element has its own tags. The tag syntax is different from the value syntax, whereas in JSON both labels and string values use the same syntax. JSON strings are delimited by the same character ("), whereas XML uses two different characters (>…<). Non-string values in JSON have more variations in their delimitation than values in XML.
bovermyer 3 days ago|
> emotional support portable fan

I can't be the only person that non-ironically has this.

orliesaurus 2 days ago|
Me too, I turn it on when things get annoying
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