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Comment by asdev | Hacker News Reader

You don't need MCP you just need function calling

Yeah, but there is a distinct advantage to using a standard.

Suppose you want your agent to use postgres or git or even file modification. You write your code to use MCP and your backend is already available. It's code you don't have to write.

Are we still writing code?

We write to fix the bullshits from ai.

Yes because we should all be building function calling implementations for the same 10 SaaS services rather than using 10 standard MCP servers.

But the standard servers should be hosted by the service provider, like mcp.slack.com as a counterpart to api.slack.com

Why should I be self-hosting ANY local MCP server for accessing an external service?

That is being done as a stop gap until official servers are released. Ideally you are writing a server for your own product/service, or custom local work.

i.e. I wrote a server for water.gov to pull the river height prediction nearby for the next 24hr. This helps the campground welcome message writing tool craft a better welcome message.

Sure that could be a plain tool call, but why not make it portable into any AI service.

Can you share this?

Remote MCP servers can do prompt injection that instruct your local agent to do something else other than only the expected tool call. https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/model-context-prot...

That flaw isn't introduced by the MCP server necessarily it can already be present in the API data it returns, you will never be able to protect yourself against someone injecting a malicious prompt that calls your code eval tool to open up a reverse shell on your MacBook Pro.

that's not the case, MCP has a feature, samplings, that allow MCP servers to run prompts using the client model.

Oh boy, you know at least the infosec people are going to get a good laugh from this clown show

I find it funny that vibers trust AI to write their entire platform but don't trust it enough to eval a curl statement.

Is there a better “universal” or standard framework to do itv

you don't need any universal standard, you just need functions specific to your app's use case

you can leverage MCPs without building any app at all.

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