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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

MCP is a protocol, and Anthropic has provided SDKs for implementing that protocol. In practice, I find the MCP protocol to be pretty great, but it leaves basically everything except the model parts out. I.e. MCP really only addresses how "agentic" systems interact with one another, nothing else.

This SDK is trying to provide a bunch of code for implementing specific agent codebases. There are a bunch of open source ones already, so this is OpenAI throwing their hat in the ring.

IMO this OpenAI release is kind of ecosystem-hostile in that they are directly competing with their users, in the same way that the GPT apps were.

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Correction: the MCP is a protocol for function calling and getting context into a model. It’s can run locally or over a network.

It does not specify how “agentic” systems interact with each other. Depending on what you mean there.

People are using the word "agentic" to mean this, I think. But yeah it's a dumb, overloaded primarily marketing word. I keep going back and forth on whether I should use the word "agentic"/"agent" at all

Thank you. Which open source ones do you recommend?

Here's a fairly comprehensive list:

https://github.com/slavakurilyak/awesome-ai-agents

CrewAI is a popular VC-backed one, but two that I think are kind of interesting in the open source space are:

https://github.com/i-am-bee/beeai-framework

https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent

... However I think the vast majority of "AI Agent" use-cases in practice right now are actually just workflows, and imo dify is great for those:

https://github.com/langgenius/dify

[edit] worth mentioning [langfuse](https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse), which is more like a platform that addresses the observability/evals/prompt management piece of the puzzle as opposed to a full-on "agent framework". In practice I have not yet run into a case where I needed something like what OpenAI just released, nor crewAI etc (despite it feeling like those cases may be coming)

Thanks. mcp-agent lacks tests so I'm skipping it for now: https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent/tree/main/tests

I just realized BeeAI is IBM's project: https://www.ibm.com/think/news/beeai-open-source-multiagent

I also see there's https://ai.pydantic.dev/ but it lacks MCP support. Finally, the MCP site maintains a nice client list:

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients#feature-support-matr...

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