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Comment by guideamigo_com1 | Hacker News Reader

MCP might be one of the few technology pieces where more articles have been written about it than the actual use-cases being built.

It is like the ERC20 era all over again.

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This particular way of seeing MCP that the article describes came up a lot during the early voice assistant ways - and I guess amazon did kind of attempt an app store approach to giving alexa more capabilities. In theory I like it! But in practice most people won't be using any one integration enough to buy it - like why go through the hoops to buy a "plane ticket purchasing app" when you do it maybe 4 times a year. I just don't see it playing out the way the author describes

It's very funny to see people talking about an extremely thin protocol like this.

It's a matter of organizing developer effort around a set of standards. Good architecture makes it easy to contribute to the ecosystem, and currently agentic tooling is the wild west, with little in terms of standardization. Now we are seeing more developer momentum around making our everyday tools accessible to agents.

Yeah, it's a good thing to be talking about pie in the sky ideas, most of which won't really work. The few good ideas that survive internet critics picking apart the smallest details could be interesting

Remember “push technology”?

Do you mean "notifications", ie a core feature of every computer and phone?

I don't feel that way. Maybe the first examples have all been related to what software people do, but I think an MCP for a travel site would be a game changer.

There are so many things I want to tell a travel site that just doesn't fit into filters, so then end up spending more time searching all kinds of permutations.

These could be done with an MCP-augmented agent.

There is no saying that they will expose more functionality through the MCP API than their web site. I imagine the API will be more limited.

No, but let me be more specific.

For example, when I search for flights, there might be situational things (like, "can you please find me a flight that has at least a 2 hour layover at <X> airport because last time i had a hard time finding the new terminal" etc.

Or an agent that will actually even READ that information from the airport website to see notices like "expect long delays in the next 3 months as we renovate Terminal 3"

Right?

The agent could have this information, and then actually look at the flight arrival/departure times and actually filter them through.

Other things like, "I can do a tuesday if cheaper, or, look through my calendar to see if i have any important meetings that day and then decide if i can pick that day to save $400"

These are all things that synthesize multiple pieces of data to ultimately arrive at something as simple as a date filter.

So, Yahoo! Pipes, but with magic and wishful thinking

Also RAG. Pipes just consumed APIs, IIRC. SOAP at that.

But definitely web mashups all over again.

that kind of synthesis is where current search interfaces fall short. the pieces exist in isolation like flight data, personal calendars, and airport notices, but nothing ties them together in a way that's actually useful. an agent using MCP could help connect those dots if the APIs are deep enough and the UX avoids feeling like a black box. the real challenge might not be the tech but getting providers to share enough useful data and trust whatever sits between them and the user.

People said similar things about smart contracts, yet here we are, with them being rather niche. I do agree that once the Alexa's and Siri's are LLM powered with MCP (or similar) support, these kinds of use cases will become more valuable and I do feel it will happen, and gain widespread use eventually. I just wonder how much other software it will actually replace in reality vs how much of it is hype.

ERC20 stood the test of time and is ubiquitous today.

Who knows what MCP looks like in a decade?

yeah even with its extreme flaws of requiring two transactions per transfer, and not having any way of the destination reacting to the transfer without another transaction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

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