Posted by maharshi365 2 days ago
I can do this trivially when my tool functions are closures that have the user-id pre-bound, but with MCP and HTTP I naively assume that the callables are pre-set.
The spec was poorly designed to begin with. Even saw some folks here thinking it was a good idea to enable MCP directly on a production database for what? Risking exfiltration of sensitive data for bad AI agents.
Given the increased security capabilities of these new models (Mythos, Astra, K3), it sounds like MCP would not be able to justify on making sense from a security perspective and would be a very bad idea to use anyway.
So no thanks and no deal.
MCP is an abstraction for remote tool calls with a standard interface. More specifically it's for when a local CLI will not do, and you want determinism and standardization. It also avoids all of the potential errors and guesswork involved with a model trying to "figure out" how to do something; you simply make one standard call, and the remote side "figures it out" for you, without failure.
If you can do what you need to do without MCP, then don't use MCP. When you eventually get sick of AIs playing guessing games with local tools/data, or spending lots of time to get functionality somebody already published as an MCP, or you need isolated control over the execution, maybe check it out again.
Yeah that's me. Idk what MCP is really, just that there's always some auth issue with it and I've never actually needed it. Is it dead yet?
Now, if you don't care about authentication, don't care about wasted tokens, don't care about the AI screwing up CLI tool calls or needing to be trained on every one, and if you don't need to call something on a server, then MCP is useless to you.
Compare that to MCP. One standard tool call. Works on every agent. Everything built in. Determinism. Reliability. Simplicity. It just works.
Skills are non-deterministic balls of mud. MCP are deterministic standard tool calls. MCP solves all the problems. A skill can't do what MCP does.
In terms of "using standards" to solve the problems, tell me 3 different APIs (from different companies) that have identical input format, identical output format, identical request URI format, identical headers, identical methods, identical auth. You won't find them, because everyone implements their API differently. You can use 50 different standards 50 different ways, and still not solve the problems mentioned above. MCP is one standard that works one way and actually solves all the problems.
And this is just addressing the client-side problems. There's a whole world of server side (logging, tracing, auth, execution, etc) that's not standard either, unless you use MCP.
that still doesn't answer why to choose MCPs over Skills.