Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is this thing really, really stupid?

I mean the whole AI personal assistant shebang from all possible angles.

Imagine, for example if booking.com built an MCP server allowing you to book a hotel room, query all offers in an area in a given time, quickly, effortlessly, with a rate limit of 100 requests/caller/second, full featured, no hiding or limiting data.

That would essentially be asking them to just offer you their internal databases, remove their ability to show you ads, remove the possibility to sell advertisers better search rankings, etc.

It would be essentially asking them to keel over and die, and voluntarily surrender all their moat.

But imagine for a second they did do that. You get the API, all the info is there.

Why do you need AI then?

Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding.

It would be essentially a smart search box, where you could type in 'book trip to Thailand for 4 people, 1 week, from July 5th', and then it would parse your query, call out to MCP, and display the listings directly to you, where you could book with a click.

The AI value add here is minimal, even non-existent.

This applies to every service under the sun, you're essentially creating a second Internet just for AIs, without all the BS advertising, fluff, clout chasing and time wasting. I, as a human am dying to get access to that internet.

Edit: I'm quite sure this AI MCP future is going to be enshittified in some way.

This is what torpedoed the first AI Assistant push in the late 1990's and early 2000s (see electric elves as an example). Basically we thought that personal travel assistants and open trading platforms would be cool things, but then discovered that content aggregators a) had a business model and b) could offer vertical integration and bulk buys, & discounts to goods providers and consumers, while also policing the platform. So we got Expedia and Ebay.

There is a more fundamental problem as well. Multi-agent systems require the programmer of the agent to influence the state of the agent in order that the agent can act to influence the states of other agents in the system. This is a very hard programming task.

You're arguing against your own straw man. "Imagine, for example if booking.com built an MCP server allowing you to book a hotel room (…) no hiding or limiting data." They're not doing that and they're not interested in that. Yes, they would need a public API for that and people could use it directly. But that's not happening.

MCP makes sense where the API already exists and makes the biggest difference if the API call is just a part of the process, not the only and final action.

Even in the booking example, you could push much more of your context into the process and integrate other tools. Rank the results by parking availability or distance to the nearest public/street parking, taking your car's height into account, looking through reviews for phrases you care about (soft bed, child care, ...) and many others things. So now we've got already 4+ different tools that need to work together, improving the results.

I think you missed the point.

To "rank the results by parking availability" you need the results. Currently these are behind paid API keys or frontends with ads.

Why would booking.com allow you to download their entire set of results multiple times through an API for free, when they charge people for that?

So what? You’re basically claiming that it’ll fail because some companies won’t want to provide too much value for free.

But that’s such a small part of the equation here. If GitHub has an MCP server, you’re still paying them to host your code (potentially), and you get the benefit of agents being able to access GitHub in your development workflow (say, to look for similar issues or start work on things).

Yes, not every company will shove their data into AI agents. But can you take various tools and plug them together using agents to power up your workflows? That’s what these projects are thinking about. And there are vast numbers of tools which would happily integrate into this process.

> So what? You’re basically claiming that it’ll fail because some companies won’t want to provide too much value for free.

> If GitHub has an MCP server, you’re still paying them to host your code (potentially)

So are you saying that all uses of MCP that rely on data you don't own or pay someone to store are not likely to exist?

I would agree with that point of view, but I'm not sure you do even though you are the one sharing it.

I don't buy it.

If they had an API Booking would not likely return their data to you, they would almost certainly have an API that you would search and which would then return the same result you get on their website. Probably with some nice JSON or XML formatting.

Booking makes a small amount of ads, but they are paid by the hotels that you book with. And yes, today they already have to compete with people who go there see a hotel listing and go find the actual hotel off-site. That would not really change if they create an MCP.

It might make it marginally more easy to do, especially automatically. But I suspect the real benefits of booking.com is: A) that you are perceived to get some form of discount and B) you get stamps toward the free stay. And of course the third part which is you trust Booking more than some random hotel.

I actually think it would be a good idea for Booking to have an API. What is the alternative?

I can right now run a Deep search for great hotels in Tokyo - that will probably go through substantially all hotels in Tokyo. Go to the hotel's website and find the information, then search through and find exactly what I want.

Booking.com might prefer I go go to their website, but I am sure they would prefer above all that you book through them.

In fact I think the idea of advertisement is given above impact here, possibly because its a popular way for the places that employ the kind of people who post here to make money, but substantially all businesses that are not web-based and that do not sell web-based services for free don't make their money through ads (at least not directly). For all those places ads are an expense and they would much prefer your AI search their (comparably cheap to serve) websites.

Basically, the only website owners who should object to you going to their website through an AI agent are those who are in the publishing industry and who primarily make money through ads. That is a small number of all possible businesses.

It doesn't make sense for a middleman like booking.com to let you completely bypass everything they offer.

However it certainly might make sense for an individual hotel to let you bypass the booking.com middleman (a middleman that the hotel dislikes already).

Scenario 1: You logon to booking.com, deal with a beg to join a subscription service (?), block hundreds of ads and trackers, just to search searching through page after page of slop trying to find a matching hotel. You find it, go to the hotels actual webpage and book there, saving a little bit of money.

Scenario 2: You ask your favorite Deep Research AI (maybe they've come up with Diligent Assistant mode) to scan for Thai hotels meeting your specific criteria (similar to the search filters you entered on booking.com) and your AI reaches out to Hotel Discovery MCP servers run by hotels, picks a few matches, and returns them to you with a suggestion. You review the results and select one. The AI agent points out some helpful deals and rewards programs that might apply. Your AI completes the booking.

The value that AI gave you is you no longer did the searching, dealt with the middleman, viewed the ads, got begged to join a subscription service, etc.

However to the hotel, they already don't really like booking.com middleman. They already strongly prefer you book directly with them and give you extra benefits for doing so. From the hotel's perspective, the AI middleman is cheaper to them than booking.com and still preserves the direct business relationship.

It's not just you.

However, I would say that I've grown to accept that most people prefer these more constrained models of thinking. Constraints can help free the mind up in other ways. If you do not perceive MCP as constraining, then you should definitely use it. Wait until you can feel the pain of its complexity and become familiar with it. This will be an excellent learning experience.

Also consider the downstream opportunities that this will generate. Why not plan a few steps ahead and start thinking about a consultancy for resolving AI microservices clusterfucks.

Yes, the metaproblem is: it has to make money. It turns out that "doing genuinely useful things for end users" almost never makes money. I found this out long ago when I had the experience that booking air travel for optimized cost/convenience was a total pain. I figured software can solve this, so built a ticket search engine that supported the query semantics a human typically wants. Dumb idea because you can't get the data over which to search except from airlines, and airlines know that making it convenient to find low convenient fares makes them less money. So they won't give you the data. In fact the entire problem "finding cheap convenient air fare" is actually there in support of someone else's (the airlines) business model.

"What is Hooli? Excellent question. Hooli isn't just another high tech company. Hooli isn't just about software. Hooli...Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it. Making the world a better place, through minimal message oriented transport layers. I firmly believe we can only achieve greatness if first we achieve goodness."

If computer use gets good enough (it isn't just yet ... but it is getting better _fast_) then it doesn't matter, you'll be able to browse the sites the same way a human does to bypass whatever shit they want to toss in your way. This makes their business models much more precarious. Also it makes removing the aggregator easier - you could search for the hotels, query their sites directly. Hotels and airlines have been trying to cut out middlemen for years, they just can't afford to lose the inbound traffic/sales it gives them. But the dynamic shifts every 5-10 years in small ways. Maybe this will be a big shift.

That said, even if the equilibrium changes from today (and I think it will) I still share your cynicism that enshittification will ensue in some form. One example right now is the increasing inability to trust any reviews from any service.

Companies that want to maintain a data moat will work to maintain that moat in the face of any new technology.

But not all data in the world is protected in that way. The use cases they promote are just easy to grasp, although they are misleading due to the reality that those examples are often ones protected by data moats.

I mean, I doubt Facebook is going to create an MCP that allows you to deeply access your social graph in a way that will allow you to bypass whatever tracking they want to do to feed their ad business. But Blender, the open source 3d application, may provide a decent MCP to interact with their application. And Wikipedia might get a few decent MCP integrations to expose their knowledge base for easier integration with LLMs (although less useful I suppose considering every LLM would be trained on that data anyway).

I guess it is just a matter of optimism vs. pessimism, (glass half empty vs. glass half full). MCP won't make data moats disappear, but they may make data that isn't behind a moat easier to work with for LLMs.

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