Comment by thenaturalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenaturalist | Hacker News Reader

Crazy, in looking up some info on the web and creating a Spreadsheet on Google Sheets to insert the results, it worked almost perfectly the first time and completely failed subsequently on 8-10 different tries.

Is there an issue with the lag between what is happening in the browser and the MCP app (in my case Claude Desktop)?

I have a feeling the first time I tried it, I was fast enough clicking the "Allow for this chat" permissions, whereas by the time I clicked the permission on subsequent chats, the LLM just reports "It seems we had an issue with the click. Let me try again with a different reference.".

Actions which worked flawlessly the first time (rename a Google spreadsheet by clicking on the title and inputting the name) fail 100% of subsequent attempts.

Same with identifying cells A1, B1, etc. and inserting into the rows.

Almost perfect on 1st try, not reproducible in 100% of attempts afterwards.

Kudos to how smooth this experience is though, very nice setup & execution!

EDIT 2: The lag & speed to click the allow action make it seemingly unusable in Claude Desktop. :(

Such a rich UI like google sheets seems like a bad use case for such a general "browser automation" MCP server. Would be cool to see an MCP server like this, but with specific tools that let the LLM read and write to google sheets cells. I'm sure it would knock these tasks out of the park if it had a more specific abstraction instead of generally interacting with a webpage

Agreed, I'd been working on a Google Sheets specific MCP last week – just got it published here: https://github.com/mkummer225/google-sheets-mcp

This is cool. You should submit this as a 'Show HN'.

Also consider publishing it so people can use it without having to use git.

Publishing it where? It can’t be a github page, it’s too complex; anything else incurs real costs.

I mean publish it on the npm registry (https://www.npmjs.com/signup). That way, it would be easy to install, just by adding some lines to claude_desktop_config.json:

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "ragdocs": {
        "command": "npx",
        "args": [
          "-y",
          "@qpd-v/mcp-server-ragdocs"
        ],
        "env": {
          "QDRANT_URL": "http://127.0.0.1:6333",
          "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "ollama",
          "OLLAMA_URL": "http://localhost:11434"
        }
      },
     }
    }
  }

I have worked on a google sheets MCP, for data scraping it worked pretty well leveraging Claude's built-in search functionalities.

example: https://x.com/xing101/status/1903391600040083488 set up: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets

What you're experiencing is commonly referred to as "luck". It's the same reason people consistently think newer versions of ChatGPT are nerfed in some way. In reality, people just got lucky originally and have unrealistic expectations based on this originally positive outcome.

There's no bug or glitch happening. It's just statistically unlikely to perform the action you wanted and you landed a good dice roll on your first turn.

haha yeh as someone who has built automation for years i can agree with this. You cant just click on something in a script, you need to reliably click on something. As a user, its very easy for you to make adjustments like clicking twice on a link if it doesnt load in time. Thats pretty much what your automation suite needs to end up with. A series of a functions to emulate user actions. You then combine that together with your scripts to create reliable scripts that can run in different conditions. LLMs wont do that for you, u need to instruct them specifically.

For me it can't click anywhere on google sheets. I get the following error

--Error: Cannot access a chrome-extension:// URL of different extension

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