Posted by pentagrama 4 hours ago
Senior programmers always advised me to only use things that have been around for at least three years. Now I finally understand why.
Yikes. I can understand the desire to mitigate churn, but following this advice would be career suicide. Trying new things is essential.
At the same time, it's often smart to avoid putting things into production that haven't matured or demonstrated staying power.
Or, to badly mangle Postel's law:
Be liberal in what you learn, and conservative in what you deploy
Maybe I'm old, but at least in web dev it doesn't feel that long ago that someone had to argue for, e.g., Vite over webpack, Svelte over React, etc..
I had to give maintenance to things people deployed to pad their resumes with "shiny new thing", and it was not fun.
If you intend to deploy and leave that as legacy for some poor shlemiel, sure.
If you intend to stay and actually keep things running, it's much better to use tried and tested stuff.
And I’m not OP, but I would assume the senior developers made a distinction between try and use.
They provide a set of tools and a context when to use those tools (much like a packaged version of a CLI+API and a skill) which makes them more discoverable than other options.
I've got a few folks using my open source data storage MCP - https://github.com/ExpeditedProjects/hutchdb - now and it makes a lot more sense than any other implementation for what they're doing
The other day I was heading to Home Depot to buy some gardening stuff and I was asking some some questions around what I could plant at this time and still harvest before winter.
It answers me, then brings up how my home improvement budget is nearing its limit for the month. I then ask it how I’m doing on my wider retirement plan and it mentions I’m a few thousand dollars ahead of schedule for the plan. So I decided it’s okay to go over budget on that category this month.
This type of emergent behavior of agents you work with having more context about you, it’s very useful in ways I didn’t expect.
I agree that on desktop it's not particularly relevant. Or through openclaw.
But for most people who use it through mobile, MCP solves some problems.
It's been a long time since I've used Claude, but is it not able to just use curl and an API key that it keeps in its "memory" on mobile? Or can it only use curl on the desktop?
I use MCP to accelerate CAD mould-making and for music production. I use it to avoid copying and pasting slack threads, and to let AI drive an eval system so I don’t have to manually configure things in a UI.
It’s just hard to imagine both not using it and being so sure it has no use.
Would be really interested to know how many of your customers actually use the MCP, who aren't already devs thinking like devs. I have doubts that many non-technical people are connecting AI to third-party services via MCP (or even using AI at all beyond "mundane" things like "generate an image of my cat as a clown" or "show me what my house looks like with blue paint and white trim").
I build integration for DollarDeploy but it was tricky.