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Comment by _QrE | Hacker News Reader

Agreed with basically the entire article. Also happy to hear that someone else was as bewildered as me when they visited the MCP site and they found nothing of substance. RFCs can be a pain to read, but they're much better than 'please just use our SDK library'.

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Agree... this is an important blog. People need to press pause on MCP in terms of adoption...it was simply not designed with a solid enough technical foundation that would make it suitable to be an industry standard. People are hyped about it, kind of like they were for LangChain and many other projects, but people are going to gradually (after diving into implementations) that it's not actually what they were looking for..It's basically a hack thrown together by a few people and there are tons of questionable decisions, with websockets being just one example of a big miss.

The Langchain repo is actually hilariously bad if you ever go read the source. I can't believe they raised money with that crap. Right place right time I guess.

Isn't that what a lot of this is about? It's a blue ocean and everyone are full of fomo.

Software quality be damned!

My first surprise on it:

I made an error trying with aws bedrock where I used "bedrock" instead of "bedrock-runtime".

The native library will give you an error back.

Langchain didn't try and do anything, just kept parsing the json and gave me a KeyError.

I was able to get a small fix, but was surprised they have no error like ConfigurationError that goes across all their backends at all.

The best I could get them to add was ValueError and worked with the devs to make the text somewhat useful.

But was pretty surprised, I'd expect a badly configured endpoint to be the kind of thing that happens when setting stuff up for the first time, relatively often.

Yeah agree. I spent a few hours looking at the langchain repo when it first hit the scene and could not for the life of me understand what value it actually provided. It (at least at the time) was just a series of wrappers and a few poorly thought through data structures. I could find almost no actual business logic.

It provides negative value by marrying your project to a bunch of unnecessary oop bullshit lol

I wish there was a clear spec on the site but there isn't https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26

It seems like half of it is Sonnet output and it doesn't describe how the protocol actually works.

For all its warts, the GraphQL spec is very well written https://spec.graphql.org/October2021/

I didn’t believe you before clicking the link, but hot damn. That reads like the ideas I scribbled down in school about all the cool projects I could build. There is literally zero substance in there. Amazing.

I thought it was just me. When I first saw all the hype around MCP I went to go read this mess and still have no idea what MCP even is.

It's JSON-RCP 2 with a specific life cycle and events. https://www.jsonrpc.org/specification

I found an explanation on a site once but haven't found any official docs. I suppose you could reverse enegiener the SDKs.

And then you read the SDK code and the bewildering doesn't stop at the code quality, organization, complete lack of using exiting tools to solve their problems, it's an absolute mess for a spec that's like 5 JSON schemas in a trench coat.

Glad to here, also thought I was alone :)

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